Ah, but do they work under PHP 5.6?

Hi Jesse,

Please allow us to apologize for the previous message about upgrading the PHP version on your account. While this is going to happen in the future it was not intended for this communication to go out to you at this time and you will not be upgraded on the 19th as specified in the email you received nor was the version information accurate. The correct date for the upgrade is March 1, 2016 and the version we are upgrading to is 5.6 rather than 5.5. We will be in touch about this again at a future date but please let us know if you have any questions or concerns in the meantime: Click here to contact DreamHost Support

Thank you!

The DreamHost Support Team

The mysql stuff should be fine under 5.6.

Hey Jesse,
We want to remind you about the important PHP update that affect the following domains you are hosting at DreamHost:
buffistas.com
buffistas.net
buffistas.org
filk.buffistas.org
Starting on March 1, 2016, we will begin automatically updating domains from PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.4 to PHP 5.6. You will get an Email when the update is complete.
We're updating PHP because:
PHP 5.3 and 5.4 have already been End-Of-Lifed (EOL'd), which means those versions are no longer receiving security updates from the developers at PHP.net.
PHP 5.5 will be EOLed in July 2016.
PHP 5.6 is well-tested, stable, and has been in production since August 2014. You can check out all the cool features on our wiki. Most sites should update just fine from PHP 5.3 or PHP 5.4 to PHP 5.6. However, there are some cases where sites can break -- usually from custom or third-party scripts, or from using out-of-date 1-Click Installs. Our wiki has all the details. If you are ready to update your sites to PHP 5.6 right now, click here to begin.
And as always, we're here to answer any questions or concerns you might have. Click here to contact DreamHost Support.
Thank you!
The DreamHost Support Team

Howdy DreamHoster,
Our technical operations team is constantly working to improve our services. As part of these improvements, we will be performing a scheduled maintenance on the host machine where your web VPS resides. This maintenance will take place this Thursday, the 31st of March, starting at 7AM PDT. The maintenance will take up to 2 hours to complete. In most cases, downtime is usually less than 5 minutes, however there can be up to 30 minutes of downtime (in a worse case scenario). We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause!
Please contact our support team if you have any questions or concerns:
https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi?tree=support.msg&
The Happy VPS Maintenance Robots!

Let me know if anything isn't working -- we got the upgrade to PHP 5.6.

OK, so the next thing up is this:

As part of our ongoing efforts to keep your DreamHost service safe, secure, and stable, we are transitioning your VPSes off of the Debian distribution of Linux and onto Ubuntu.

If this means anything to you, let me know, and I can forward the full message along.

No big deal.

I got this twice: Fatal error: Call to undefined function session_register() in /home/buff_org/buffistas.org/classes/user.php on line 86

just now before reloading brought me to the homepage.

Ditto.

Same.