The PHP.net website has in the last 20 years made use of an extensive network of mirrors to make the PHP documentation available, and distribute source tarballs. These mirrors have been maintained by members and companies in the PHP eco-system for many valuable years. However, the administration of the mirror system is often haphazard, with few contributors helping out—PHP is Open Source, and this is simply how these things can go.

Maintaining the mirrors is now no longer sustainable, and also hinders the take up of moving the PHP.net website fully to HTTPS. Because the PHP.net team has no access to the mirror servers, we also can't make sure the mirrors are up-to-date, and some mirrors are still running PHP 5.3.

It is likely no longer necessary to have a mirror system in place, as unlike 20 years ago, it is not nearly has hard as setting up a distributed cache system. As a matter of fact, some of the PHP.net web site, through https://www.php.net/, already sits behind a Content Delivery Network (CDN) from Myra, which is sponsored by long time PHP contributor Sascha Schumann.

With these preliminaries out of the way, I would therefore like to announce the discontinuation of PHP.net's mirroring program. Instead of having mirrors, we are moving all of PHP.net to HTTPS (and get rid of https://secure.php.net, which we don't need any more), and move them behind Myra's CDN, with the same local content delivery opportunities, but at significantly less administration requirements.

Watch this space for further developments!

To end this post, I would very much like to thank all the mirror maintainers for their dedication, time, and bandwidth over all these years. Thanks!