Advantages of Linux and PHP

If you have decided to have your own website, and are planning to use the services of a suitable web hosting company for the purpose, you may have select a particular web hosting service from among many available, based on your requirements. One of the issues that you should consider in web hosting is the operating system and programming environment that are used. You may wonder how these are important to you, since someone else will be managing the actual web-hosting job.

Although the web hosting company will be responsible for seeing that your site is available to web surfers at any time without problems, the maintenance of the site and its contents are managed by you. The operating system and programming language will have a direct impact on these activities, apart from having certain other long-term implications for the web hosting company itself.

To understand what these are, let us look at some of the advantages that Linux/PHP based web-hosting systems can offer. Before proceeding further, however, you should know that there are two broad options available to you (and a web hosting company). Each of these has its own advantages, and it’s a question of choosing whatever suits you best. As a general rule of thumb, it may be stated that open source systems such as Linux and PHP are more suited to small companies buying web-hosting space from third party providers.

Open source

What is open source software and what are its advantages? In good old days before the concept of web hosting was known to mankind, each computer company had its own proprietary standard that it used to develop hardware and supporting software. It was not possible to use the software of one company on the computer of another company. That was an obvious disadvantage that was acceptable when the use of computers was very restricted. With the advent of the personal computer and widespread use of computers, there had to be something more flexible, and that’s how the concept of open source software was born. Without going into great details, we can say that open source software is “free” software. The word free is used here not as in “free lunch”, but in the sense that anyone has the freedom to add to or modify it. Very often open source software is also available free of cost, or for a considerably smaller fee than proprietary counterparts. As an end user of web hosting services, cost is not the only, or even the most important advantage for you in using open source software. The biggest advantage is that constant updates and improvements keep happening, and support from a very large user group is available. If you have some special requirements, the open source software can be modified to meet these, and chances are that you will get a lot of advice about how to do it from the user groups.

What is Linux?

Linux is an operating system like the Mac OS or Windows that is used to perform basic operations required to keep your computer functioning. Unlike the Mac OS or Windows, Linux is open source, which means that anyone can make enhancements and changes to it. Linux has been gaining popularity as an operating system and is being used along with the other software in the so-called LAMP group. LAMP is an acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.

PHP and its advantages

PHP is an open source programming language that is used to write server side scripts, which are instructions written in a programming language. Scripts could be written in various languages such as Cold fusion, ASP or PHP. Apart from being open source, PHP has several other advantages that make it ideal for small business web hosting. One of the main advantages of PHP is the shorter learning curve, and the extensive support available from user groups. Another advantage is that PHP can run on a variety of platforms including Microsoft Windows, unlike other languages such as ASP that run only on windows platform.

As an end user of web hosting services, these advantages are important top you, because they will help you maintain your website more easily and to find the necessary support and staff readily. They will also bring down the overall cost of web hosting.