Nothing in Google helped me find this, so maybe this will get indexed at some point and make the next person’s life a bit easier. So you want PHP5 on your 1&1 shared hosting account? All you need to do is add “AddType x-mapp-php5 .php” to your .htaccess file, simple enough.

Have no idea what that means and still need PHP5?
What are .htaccess files?

After reading that, you’ll understand that you can set custom configurations for your web server outside the apache configuration files, and they are specific for that directory. So, either FTP or SSH into your 1&1 server and create the file. If you going the SSH route, familiarize yourself with a linux text editor (1&1 has vi & joe installed, google those). Once there, either create or upload a file with the text above, and viola, you are now using PHP5.

On the topic of htaccess files, this has been really helpful to me recently. If you need to create clean looking urls (i.e. www.website.com/page/how-to/php instead of www.website.com/index.php?a=page&b=how-to&c=php), check out this link.