What Is PHP Hosting?

Selecting hosting environment is such a difficult task, when you have so many options offered! The hosting option you choose should possess some certain technical features so that your online project could develop and grow. Besides, there must be the proper scripting environment so that your website could function normally.

One of the most interesting options is PHP web-hosting. This is a type of web-hosting that can read and execute PHP programming language. This PHP Hosting FAQ will teach you what the role of PHP in hosting is and its benefits over other hosing variants.

What is PHP?

PHP is a scripting language that was created by the PHP group. PHP language is open-source, and it interprets in real time. It’s not built in the code of the machine where it runs. PHP serves to generate dynamic content, and is typically imbedded into functioning HTML code. The main purpose of PHP language is to provide an efficient and free tool to generate dynamic websites. Today, it’s one of the most popular scripting languages across the planet.

You can identify PHP files by .php extension after the filename. If you want to learn more about PHP, or just search for PHP-related information, check out PHP.net – the support center for PHP developers from all corners of the world.

PHP and Web Hosting

As far as PHP works on servers, they process the source code. Therefore, front end users do not access the code like they do with HTML websites. But PHP sites still can and do contain some snippets of CSS and HTML. PHP is a flexible language, and allows doing things that most websites don’t do.

Before you make any decision concerning selection of a web host, you need to make sure that it supports PHP environment. If it’s not totally supported, any PHP scripting you have can be rendered as HTML instead.

PHP can provide a lot of useful features, such as:

1. Show the most suitable version of a website for selected screen size;
2. Generate interactive websites that work with user input;
3. Create interactive pages, blogs, and forums;
4. Receive and send cookies;
5. Make a website with dynamic content using a database.

Note that PHP web hosts work on both Windows and Linux platforms. The most widespread combination is PHP-Linux.

Advantages of PHP Hosting

If your website was created with PHP, and your web host supports it, you can enjoy a lot of benefits that other environments cannot provide. Here are the most significant benefits of PHP hosting:

• Compatibility. Being a universal scripting language, PHP can make any website compatible with any device, be that iPads, iPhones, or Android smartphones and tablets. PHP may generate websites that look perfectly on every screen size, which is very important for modern websites.
• Simplicity of use. A lot of developers prefer working with PHP, because it easily integrates with CSS and HTML, and you don’t need extra plugins or software to make it work. Besides, this is a must for websites based on Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.
• It’s very quick. PHP doesn’t require much server resources, so your website can work much faster and won’t hurt overall website performance. When a website consumes tons of server resources to load a page, it not only adds to hosting expenses, but also affects end-user experience.
• It may be cheaper. As far as PHP is a free open-source language, hosting costs of PHP are usually less than on other commercial language hosting environments.
• PHP can be simply integrated with databases. Another benefit of PHP becomes clear, when you start integrating it with databases like MySQL. PHP is so versatile it can be integrated with other databases, as well. This is an essential requirement for the vast majority of CMS, online stores, blogs and forums.

PHP hosting can be a great solution for all who need high compatibility, fast performance, and simplicity of use. Besides, if you’re tech-savvy enough, you can save on hosting and manage PHP websites on your own.