With the many specialized types of hosting services available today, it can sometimes be complicated to find the right kind of hosting provider for your own needs. If you look hard enough, you can probably find a specialized hosting company for any kind of platform out there, and while sometimes these offers can be very attractive, in other cases they don’t make much sense and you’ll want to avoid them at all costs.
PHP hosting is a hotly debated topic in particular, and there is a huge divide in opinions about it on the scene. Depending on your needs, you may or may not benefit from getting a good deal on a specialized PHP host. But in most cases, as it turns out, you’d be far better off looking in another direction and choosing a more general shared hosting solution if you want a good value for your money.
What is PHP hosting?
PHP hosting is a broad term that’s sometimes not that clearly defined, and the exact definition can range from one provider to another. In general, it refers to a type of hosting plan that’s focused on providing an adequate PHP experience in particular, and it often also means that the use of the server’s resources is tightly restricted to applications that have to do with PHP.
The exact limitations will be different from one company to another, but in general, you’ll find that you’ll often need to set up a separate hosting plan to do small things and experiment with your website in various ways. While PHP hosting can be quite cheap – and easy to set up too – that cost is often compensated by its usability and the extensiveness of its feature set.
Indeed, many people who start out with dedicated PHP hosting tend to migrate to other alternatives sooner or later, as the seemingly small limitations of this type of hosting usually become much more serious and problematic later on.
How is shared hosting better?
Shared hosting, on the other hand, refers to a hosting plan where many users share the same server for their resources. Dozens, even thousands of accounts might be hosted on the same physical machine, with complicated software being responsible for allocating resources evenly across everyone and ensuring that there is no starvation across the board.
While this may sound limiting and uncomfortable at first, it’s actually one of the best types of hosting plans available out there right now, and there’s a reason why so many companies tend to offer shared hosting as their most popular plan. Users who know what they need usually flock to this type of hosting pretty much naturally, while those who start out with something else usually realize their mistake sooner or later, and end up switching to shared hosting for the long term.
There is a lot to gain from having full control over your hosting experience, especially when it comes to what types of languages and applications you can run on your site. This may not matter that much for someone looking to run a simpler, less specialized site, but for users with more broadly defined needs, shared hosting is basically a must.
Are there any exceptions?
This is not a universal rule of course – if it was, PHP hosting wouldn’t exist at all. The truth is that PHP hosting does have its uses and there are niche cases where it can be a much more viable option than shared plans. However, recognizing those use cases usually requires you to have a good deal of experience and intuition about the way this market works, and it will take some time before you’re capable of making the right decision in this regard.
For someone just starting out, going with shared hosting as the default choice is definitely the best thing you can do, especially if you need to minimize the amount of hassle involved and ensure that you will be able to get your site up and running in no time. There is a good variety of shared hosting plans on the market at any time, and many companies tend to run regular discounts on them too, so you should never have to look too long to find a good deal.
But if you do spot a viable use case for PHP hosting, by all means go for it. It can save you time and effort, while also providing you with some potentially valuable features that you won’t get in other types of hosting deals on the general market.
