Is it possible to have Magento ver. 1.9.1.0 and 2.1.0 on the same VPS server?

Question

I have one production Magento store right now - it runs on ver. 1.9.1.0. I just tried to install a brand new Magento store on another domain (separate account within the same VPS re-seller hosting account) via Softaculous in the Cpanel and it gets stuck at 95%. I checked the system requirements for the 2.1.0 version and it says:

PHP 5.6 We do not support PHP 5.5.x 
PHP 7.0.2, 7.0.6 up to 7.1 
MySQL 5.6 
Apache 2.2 or 2.4 nginx 1.8 (or latest mainline version)

I currently have this on the server:

PHP Version 5.5.27 
MySQL Version   5.6.30 
Apache Version  2.2.29

I tried to find out what the system requirements are for the 1.9.1 version and it seems:

PHP:
PHP 5.4.x
PHP 5.5.x

Database:
MySQL 5.6 

Web Server:
Apache 2.x

Looking at all this - it seems that the only thing which is not sufficient for the 2.1.0 minimum system requirements is the PHP (I have 5.5.27 and it requires 5.6 but Magento version 1.9.1.0 will not run on PHP 5.6, right?)

Any ideas what I could do?

Answer 1

The most future proof setup would be an upgrade to PHP 7.1 and this inofficial PHP 7 compatibility extension for Magento 1.9: https://github.com/Inchoo/Inchoo_PHP7

It is actively maintained by the people at Inchoo, a Magento partner that's very active in the community since the beginning, you probably have seen their blog when you searched for anything Magento related.

Of course you should first test if all your extensions are compatible. You can use the PHP 7 Compatibility Checker(php7cc) to do so: https://github.com/sstalle/php7cc

Answer 2

You can set up your server to run with multiple versions of PHP, as explained in this question.