PHP Hosting for Dynamic Web Sites

All IIC Internet Services web hosting accounts come with PHP4 installed and ready for your use!

What is PHP?

PHP is the most popular server side scripting language for writing dynamic web pages. PHP can be used to write server-side programs that access databases, like Microsoft's ASP (Active Server Pages), JSP (Java Server Pages), and Macromedia's Cold Fusion. PHP is especially well-suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. PHP is secure, easy to learn, efficient, fast to code and fast to deploy. PHP is being used by over nine million web sites, that's over 24% of the sites on the Internet, thanks largely to benefits such as quicker response time, improved security, and transparency to the end user.

Why Use PHP?

PHP is built from the ground-up with database functionality built in, particularly MySQL functionality.

PHP code gets embedded into HTML pages. This makes it very fast to code web pages and fast to deploy a new site, thus speeding up Web development and lowering overall cost of ownership. An important code management technique for programmers is separating code from data. This allows us to make changes to the code or data without affecting the other. PHP uses the <?php ?> tags to indicate "code inside".

PHP scripts tend to be more secure than scripts written in other languages such as Perl. This is because PHP has built-in a lot of the internal operations of dealing with web page requests and serving information.

PHP is easy to learn. It's easier to learn than C, Python, Java, and most other programming languages used in web development. Accessing web form variables in PHP is straightforward, but in a language such as Perl requires either detailed knowledge of either HTTP header formats or one of many CGI libraries.

PHP takes minimal "overhead," meaning that PHP scripts will run fast. Faster than CGI scripts written in Perl. And thus you'll be able to handle more simultaneous users on your site. Benchmarking tests show time and again that PHP runs faster than other web programming languages. Check out these benchmarking analyses done by major computing magazines.

PHP code tends to be more consistent and modular than other web programming languages.

There are more freely-downloadable 'open source' PHP scripts than scripts written in competing web programming languages. Not only are huge numbers of PHP scripts 'open source,' meaning that the source code is freely available and not proprietary, but also the PHP programming language itself is open source. Thus, developers from all over the world donate their time to help improve the PHP language and look for bugs.

So rather than recreating the wheel, start with a PHP script or PHP-based software package that's already written. Hotscripts offers a massive library of thousands of PHP scripts for the taking.

PHP vs ASP Comparisons

If you're contemplating using Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP), you may want to consider the following arguments and go with PHP instead.

PHP vs ASP
7 Reasons to Choose PHP over ASP

ASP to PHP Conversion Tool

More Information on PHP

Full PHP documentation can be accessed from http://www.php.net/docs.php.

Some other tutorials to check out:

• WebMonkey [http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/99/21/index2a.html]
• PHP.net [http://www.php.net/tut.php]
• PHPBuilder [http://www.phpbuilder.com/getit/]
• PHPWizard [http://www.phpwizard.net/]
• Zend [http://www.zend.com/zend/art/langdiff.php]