According to the PHP website, PHP stands for is a recursive acronym for 'PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor'. PHP is a general purpose web programming language similar to C or Perl.

Developed as an advanced web development language since 1995, PHP is now a robust platform for web application development, especially for sites that connect to an SQL database (often MySQL), used on over 15 million sites as of December 2003.

However, not all PHP hosting sites are created equal. While all PHP hosts may indeed have some version of PHP installed, several distinctions will become apparent to intermediate and advanced PHP programmers. For projects of any significant scope, choosing advanced PHP hosting, by a host that specializes in PHP, is very important. For example, the average PHP webhost is not likely to offer support for any of the following:

Ghostscript

Ctype

BZ2

Ming

DBX

PfPro

YATS

This is just to name a few -- it is not an exhaustive list of PHP extensions used by advanced PHP web developers. Some PHP programmers may need to do specific searches for bcmath hosts, MCAL hosts, InnoDB hosts, Pspell hosts, Mhash hosts, NetPBM hosts, mnogosearch hosting, gettext hosting, php5 hosting, ImageMagick hosts, Gettext hosts, Zend Optimizer hosting, Ming hosts, or OpenSSL hosts.

You should always make sure your host provides a detailed explanation of their specific php virtual host setup.

Here are some technical considerations to investigate when selecting a PHP virtual host for your next expert PHP / SQL programming and development project:

Security

Flexibility


Advancedphphosting.com is an informational resource on hosting sql PHP websites and choosing php hosting sites. It is hosted and sponsored by Modwest.