In the last decade php hosting become an important source of revenue for hosting provider companies. The number of PHP website is constantly increasing the need for php hosting too.
How do we choose a good php hosting, price, which technical criteria … some small details that you don’t figure at first glimpse could change your idea to decide between choosing this php hosting or another.
Price, Size and bandwidth
This is the first and most important criteria of course, cheap php hosting is always a good business to test something that you don’t want to invest big money on it, like a personal blog, … etc.
For example a personal blog won’t need a huge bandwidth, If you don’t put video or mp3 so be sure that you won’t exceed the 1GB your first year, even the second year ! so why looking for more ?
Some php hosting offers hosting space of 100MB, some offer 500Mb and you now can find even cheap php hosting offers with 1GB and more. Yes, I said cheap php hosting.
The price anyway will vary for small hosting packages between $3 and $10 monthly, depending on the services that companies offer and quality of service.
What do you need with PHP ?
PHP hosting don’t mean that you have PHP with everything installed, first you should know that almost all php hosting companies offer php in safe mode, its shared hosts so very normal.
The second thing that we should know is what’s installed with php ? If the information don’t exist on their website just take few minutes to ask them if you find a good offer. A link to phpinfo will be great, so you can know what you can run on this hosting and what you cannot.
You’ll find also php installed as CGI this is great for performance on linux and apache servers.
What should I know too ?
There is things that I’m discovering with new php hosting companies and their server’s configuration ! Some company do really strange configuration that will make blurry later when you want to install a php software.
I’ll give you an example, some techniques of Search engine optimization consider rewriting the URLs using forceType in htdocs. I faced this problem with some php hosting companies, where I figured that I cannot use this techniques and make me very very limited !
Conclusion
This is just some few tips and criteria to choose a php hosting, first try to google for php hosting providers, compare offers, pick the ones that fit your budget and business needs. If you worry about some details, contact them for testing account, some companies offer it, or they just can answer your question before you decide to buy from them or no.
Unfortunately not all software run on all php hosting due to the different configuration from a company to another and the limitation of shared hosting.
