What command are you using to execute artisan?

in cPanel forwarders the command is:

/home/mysite/artisan parseemail

Try this

/usr/local/php55/bin/php /home/mysite/artisan parseemail

Yes I wanted to try that already, but on the shared hosting (SiteGround, if that makes any difference) cPanel is set up in a way that prevents me from doing this - when I typed command as you suggest, it was converted relative to my home directory, so I ended up with below, which did not work:

/home/mysite/usr/local/php55/bin/php /home/mysite/artisan parseemail 

But I have modified the hasbang of artisan to make sure it is parsed with php 5.5 (As per my initial post) so should have the same effect really?

I would suggest opening a support ticket with them as to how you can go about this.

But the command itself starts OK - do you think the error has something to do with artisan being run under a different version of PHP?

Ok after a bit of digging I found out that if I do php55 artisan, then I get a list of possible artisan commands to execute. But if I try to run ./artisan directly I am getting exception error - even though the hashbang is correctly (confirmed by my host support) set up to run php 5.5.