An Overview of PHP Hosting
If you want to have a strong online presence it is not only a website that you need. You need to have a domain name for the site and need a home for your website in the World Wide Web. This is what refers to web hosting that is basically a service providing you with the space on a server so that users can access your site anytime they want. But all web hosts are not made equal. They differ in terms of storage capacity, up time, price, customer service, support for different programming languages, databases and control panel services. And it is the issue of programming language and database that we are going to cater in this article.
PHP stands for Hyper Pre-Processor. It is an open source programming language that is widely used for website development and designing. It can be written as a script to return output as HTML to the browser and is very easy being an expansion of C and C++.
Benefits of using PHP as a language include faster browsing and dynamic website development. It is a language that allows you to add as many capabilities to your website as you want including multimedia. The data is first processed at the server location and when the user accesses the website it is loaded in very low time. It does not rely on external applications to be executed. Furthermore, if you want to turn your static website into a dynamic one, PHP is the best choice as it is reliable, quick and efficient and allows you to communicate two ways on internet in real time.
PHP hosting thus refers to hosting that supports PHP language on server side. Almost all web hosting services support the language as it is the pervasive web development language these days. It is a highly important factor to be considered while selecting a web hosting service that the server supports the language you are using for web development and design.
SQL stands for Standard Query Language and MySQL is a vendor that supports this language. It is a very easy programming language for database development, updating and deletion.
A perfect combination of a programming language and the database is capable of deriving huge traffic to your site turning your online business into a goldmine. The issue is of more importance if you are offering e-commerce services to your target market as the users will prefer to have a shopping experience with a website that comes with features like SSL certificates, unlimited database, mailing list functions and shopping cart function plus a website that responds in real time.
PHP is the most common scripting language for MySQL. PHP and MySQL together make an excellent combination as they mesh well with each other. You can get both in an ‘all in one’ package or may select the preferences while deciding about the web hosting package. In first case the server will check for the compatibility of the versions of PHP and MySQL and you need not to worry about the issue. But in case you want to go for a customized web hosting package you need to pay special attention to the compatibility of versions of PHP and MySQL.