Order status not changing...

The best would be to have a mechanism to use curl, if there, or fallback to fsockopen otherwise.

Recompiling Apache with mod_ssl did the trick.

However indeed it would be best to have some sort of backup mechanism. Because of lack of updates from cPanel on the mod_ssl I hope I can remove this module in the future.

Do I need to put in a bug- or feature request for this?

It's not a bug. You don't need to post a new message for a feature request. It's added to the todo list on our end. However, that's a low priority as there is already a way to avoid the problem.
If you happen to write the code to switch between curl and fsockopen for the paypal plugin, don't hesitate to post it and we can include it in HikaShop by default.