PHP

Hypertext Preprocessor, or PHP is a widely used server-side scripting language that is at the forefront of web development. In fact, around 80% of websites – whose programming languages we know – use PHP. The problem is, most of them are still using deprecated versions even though PHP 7 has …

Choosing the right programming language or framework for your next project is always complicated. Ask a dozen developers for their opinion and chances are you’ll get a dozen different answers, which brings us to one of the most heated debates in the field – which is better, ASP.NET or PHP? …

A few weeks ago we published a WordPress infographic showing the staggering growth of the platform. One of the key statistics in the infographic is that over 11% off all WordPress sites are hosting their sites in the newly recommended PHP 7 and HTTPS WordPress Hosting environment. A2 Hosting is …

In previous blog posts, including our comparison of HHVM vs PHPNG, we talk about how PHP 7 typically beats HHVM by up to 20% and it is up to 100% faster than PHP 5.6 (even though we do need to run our own performance comparisons here at A2 Hosting). These numbers are definitely provide a nice broad overview of the dramatic performance boost and memory efficiency enhancements offered by PHP 7.

If you are not a developer, you probably aren't familiar with HHVM and PHPNG. If you're hosting your site with A2 Hosting though, it's more than likely your site is powered by PHP. The beta version of PHP 7 was just released on Friday so it doesn't hurt to learn how this new version of PHP can dramatically increase the performance of your site. First we need to step back about 7 years and look at another project called HHVM to get a better idea of the direction of PHP 7 and why PHP developers focused on certain features in this version.

As you may have read on our June 29th blog post, the alpha version of PHP 7 was released. Since that post was published, PHP released the first beta version of PHP. We know that PHP 7 has a clear cut focus on performance. Let's look at some of the contributing elements to those performance improvements and the other enhancements included with PHP 7.

With the recent Alpha release of PHP 7, A2 Hosting is proud to be one of the first providers to offer PHP 7 Hosting. PHP 7 is available on A2 Hosting's Turbo Web Hosting service. Our PHP Switcher makes it easy to move between multiple PHP versions including PHP 5.1-5.6, and of course PHP 7.

I'm surprised whenever I look at recently written PHP and see folks are still writing their HTML inline with their code. Perhaps it's because so many PHP tutorials teach this style, or maybe people just aren't aware of the advantages of separating it out. If you still write this way, feel free to comment on why. I'll try to explain the advantages of separating it out here. I won't get into the details of Model-View-Controller programming here, see that Wikipedia article or a blog post I will probably eventually do about it. But for now I will just plead that you separate out your display HTML from your functional PHP code.

The release of PHP 5.5 has been announced, and it will be deprecating the old standard MySQL functions (such as mysql_query). It's been known that this was coming for a while, and developers have been encouraged to migrate to MySQLi or PDO, but many haven't. If you've been putting it off, it's probably time to make the jump before moving to PHP 5.5. Of course the MySQL functions will still work in 5.5 but you'll have to suppress the deprecated warnings.