Just wondering, are these high traffic sites or ones that require something specific to be installed?

If not, I'd be suggesting not to go down the VPS route where you have to set up your own hosting environment, and just sign up for a reseller account somewhere that provides vanilla cPanel accounts. Then you can just pick PHP5.6 as the PHP version and you've got quick options to turn on and off PHP modules. You've then got backups covered (as most hosts offer that) too and clean separation of accounts.

I've set up a couple of 5.6 sites in the past on VPSes. The last one I can remember was running CentOS 7 (and Amazon Linux which is based on CentOS), but I've also found Ubuntu LTS version to be easy to set up. In fact, any recent linux distro is ok, it's more whether it has the packages available that you need, and what you're familiar with.

Every time I roll out a new server I tend to always have to go look up a list of package install commands. Even when I keep a log of the commands I use, the next time around I find that things are still a bit different. Installing PHP and MySQL/MariaDB isn't really tricky, it's the extra stuff like installing the extra PHP mods and enabling them where I find the time gets sunk.

So if you do need to use a VPS, I'd be picking a common distro like Ubuntu and Googling for 'how to install PHP 5.6 and MySQL on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS'. You'll find some guides that will cover PHP7 setups, but also some that also show how to install older PHP versions.

Concrete 5.6 doesn't have to be constrained to mysql or php 5.6.
I have live 5.6 sites running on mysqli and php 7.1.19
In fact on my local dev wamp box I have a Concrete 5.6 site running on php 7.2.7 and mysqli with no problems after the debugging was completed.

Thank you both for responding.
My customer wants Docker container on VPS.
My install was adding pdo_mysql instead of mysqli

Working now.

For future DOCKER users who need this build:

DOCKERFILE:
FROM php:7.2-apache
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
libfreetype6-dev \
libjpeg62-turbo-dev \
libmcrypt-dev \
libpng-dev \
&& docker-php-ext-configure gd --with-freetype-dir=/usr/include/ --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/include/ \
&& docker-php-ext-install pdo pdo_mysql mysqli gd zip

Sean

To easily install the PHP GD library (and many others) on a Debian docker image you can simply write



(Provided that you have installed my install-php-extensions script - seehttps://github.com/mlocati/docker-php-extension-installer... for details)

A very easy way to get up and running is using one of the Bitnami Stacks:

http://bitnami.com/stack/lamp

About Bitnami LAMP Stack

Bitnami LAMP Stack provides a complete, fully-integrated and ready to run LAMP development environment. In addition to PHP, MySQL and Apache, it includes FastCGI, OpenSSL, phpMyAdmin, ModSecurity, SQLite, Varnish™, ImageMagick, xDebug, Xcache, OpenLDAP, ModSecurity, Memcache, OAuth, PEAR, PECL, APC, GD, cURL and other components and the following frameworks:Zend Framework, Symfony, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Smarty, Laravel.

They also have a stack including concrete5 (8.4.0 - 15 days ago), still quite handy:

https://bitnami.com/stack/concrete5...

You can run 5.6 - Installable in the cloud, Win/Mac/Linux and virtual machines. Just thought I'd throw it out there for anyone else looking. Not affiliated, but I've used several in the past.