If you have chosen to use a Linux web hosting service then the chances are that you have decided to develop your website using PHP and MySQL because these two combined provide you with the best website possible for hosting in a Linux hosting environment. PHP web hosting services generally combine the standard features of a Linux hosting service with the advance features that will enable you to develop the most effective and functional website possible. PHP can offer you many different modules that will provide you with different attributes and functions that you can incorporate into your web scripts with ease; the good thing with PHP at the core is that you can add and take away modules from your PHP installation as per your wish. MySQL is a popular open source database server that can be integrated with PHP websites very easily; because it is open source you won’t have to worry about any restrictions affecting the amount of data that you are able to store in your database nor will you have to pay any licensing fees. Any good web hosting company will also be able to provide you with access to a script installer that will install a wide variety of PHP scripts in your web space for you with a few clicks.
PHP is part of the popular ‘LAMP’ setup, which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, and so is one of the most popular scripting language choices amongst web developers who wish to develop websites that will interact with the Linux operating system on a high level. As PHP is an open source scripting language, it is relatively easy to modify the core of the scripting language if you wish to add additional functionality or would like to make the scripting engine more secure to help protect your server overall. PHP is a multi-platform scripting engine meaning that as well as being available for Linux, you can also choose to use PHP on Windows and other operating systems with ease; most web hosting companies endeavour to offer support for PHP with their Windows shared hosting packages whilst it can also be easily installed on Windows VPS servers and Windows dedicated servers that are running IIS 7. Although PHP may not be so easy to modify on a Windows server, you do gain the added benefit of being able to use a Microsoft SQL Server database if required.
PHP scripts can be designed to return pretty much any response of your choice, allowing you to create PHP web pages that can return content in another client side scripting language. A popular application of this is with RSS feeds because the PHP script is designed to retrieve database content from a MySQL database and then the script will then process this content based on your code to display it in the web browser, with the web browser usually being told that the final product is going to be displayed in XML format. This level of customization means that PHP can be used to create dynamic websites of any sort, with the functionality that you can add being pretty much unlimited although you are going to be restricted to the functions that PHP is able to offer you. PHP scripts can be integrated with client side technologies such as Javascript and XML to produce AJAX systems that are able to post data to pages without the need for the web page to be refreshed, thus saving on the amount of bandwidth that is used and providing users with a much smoother browsing experience.
It is important for you to code your websites to a high level to make sure that they are secure and can’t be compromised through various means because a poorly coded website can not only compromise your own web hosting account but also the web hosting server as a whole. Different web developers will develop their websites in different ways but in any situation you need to make sure that the code used doesn’t contain holes that can be exploited through relatively simple means such as SQL injections. If you find that your website can be exploited then hackers may try to gain access to your databases; if you are storing important and confidential customer information in your databases then you could be in trouble if hackers actually manage to steal any of the data that you are suppose to be keeping safe.
PHP is a highly scalable scripting language and is ideal for use in situations where the completed project needs to be able to cope with high traffic loads without failing at any level. When coded correctly, PHP websites are able to cope with high visitor numbers without putting too much strain on the resources available because at the end of the day, you don’t want to be compromising the reliability of your web hosting service. However, you also need to consider the power of the server that you are using when developing a website that is going to experience high traffic loads; a shared web hosting service may not be appropriate in this situation as you may find that a VPS server or dedicated server can offer you a more reliable and customizable hosting experience. In terms of your choice of PHP hosting package, you should consider your need for resources based on your visitor numbers rather than the amount of content that you will be hosting.
In conclusion, PHP is a very good and intuitive scripting language to use if you wish to create dynamic websites for hosting in a Windows or Linux web hosting environment. The way in which MySQL databases can be integrated into PHP scripts makes PHP an ideal solution for creating highly scalable websites that will be able to cope with the high visitor loads that you can expect as a website expands. If you are familiar with web scripting then it is very easy to create a PHP website that is not only secure, but can also offer a wide variety of functionality to visitors.