VPS Hosting

VPS Hosting As the name implies, renting means that you share a server of one provider with many other websites. You share your server resources with other websites, which means that if a site has a problem it can spill onto your site and a good shared host will try to mitigate this. Some hosting providers offer shared plans, and they are often the cheapest option available.

If your hosting environment is virtualized, you will be isolated from other websites by being on the same physical server. Virtualization technology has a high level of security so that servers from other websites cannot affect the virtualized host in any way. If your host environment is virtualized, it is completely isolated from the other sites on the server.

VPS hosting is cheaper than dedicated web hosting because multiple users contribute to the cost of a single server. VPS is similar to shared hosting but instead of your site sharing a server with other sites, some sites share space and resources on a server that has been divided into various virtualized server environments. Just like Share Hosting, VPS provides a baseline of resources, but you are guaranteed to have additional resources if your website experiences an increase in traffic.

VPS hosting is a happy medium in terms of flexibility, security, reliability and scalability. VPS (Virtual Private Server) is compared to shared hosting in almost every respect, especially when it comes to technology. A VPS is a server in a shared environment where much more than one user runs on the same physical machine, and the technology that allocates resources and keeps users separate is more mature.

VPS servers can be used on the same machine for multiple websites or for joint hosting with some websites. In a VPS plan, the physical server is split into several virtual servers to store files and web pages. This means that multiple websites located on the server do not have to share resources.

The most obvious limitation is the sharing of computing power, memory, disk space, and other resources on a server. With this collective sharing, one site on a shared server can gobble up resources and slow down other sites on the server. Dedicated hosting is when a physical server has dedicated resources for a single user and website.

The difference between the two hosting types is the server type on which your website is stored. Shared VPS Hosting is a dedicated server that stores content and files from your websites on a separate server.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting gives you your own partitioned resources, but they are distributed across many different servers in the cloud. A VPS hosting partition is like owning a penthouse condominium (or many apartments) – it’s a building where you have everything you need but don’t have to share what you need. It gives more space to grow and less constraints than a digital condominium because more space is needed when you host your site or application on a virtual server assigned to you.

Shared hosting is the cheapest form of hosting if you are a website owner who needs the extra resources that VPS Hosting provides. It is the perfect form of host for newcomers and site owners as it is simple to get started and provides sufficient server resources for the initial phase of your site growth. At functional level, VPS Hosting offers your website a high level of performance, scalability and security. 

VPS hosting is excellent in offering reliability, speed and customization when selecting a hosting package for a large website. It allows you to customize and configure applications and software to improve the performance of your websites, provide root access and allow you to customize the backend to your needs. Whether you are an experienced website developer or a local start-up, this is something to consider.

Shared hosting can be a good option for short-term plans for small online sites, but you will have more problems with overall performance if your site comes to large traffic levels.

Shared servers offer customers bandwidth, management, flexibility and performance, while the host handles technical configuration, maintenance and security. Shared VPS hosting is coupled with other common options such as dedicated hosting and cloud hosting. Shared hosting tends to be cheaper because the provider can serve many customers on one computer.

VPS hosting offers more resources and tends to be more reliable, but costs more. If you are using a reputable host that does a good job managing shared server resources such as HostGator, the difference between a shared hosting plan and a low-traffic VPS may not be obvious. For VPS hosting as the cost of shared hosting is shared between many users and shared servers, you can expect to pay more than for shared hosting.

If you have a website that requires medium to high traffic and a lot of CPU and memory, such as a WordPress site with database-intensive plugins and other features, you might notice a difference between a shared hosting account and a VPS with low traffic on the backend of your website. This does not mean that your site will be below this traffic level but if you have complex WordPress themes or many images on your website, there could be enough traffic to reduce page loading times if you compete with other peoples server resources. In general, sites with VPS are faster than those with shared hosting, which can lead to better conversions.

VPS is a better option if you expect your website to get more traffic and can afford to pay a little more. You don’t have to share resources with many other websites. 

What are the PHP 8 improvements and features

Faster code execution

The latest PHP version brings a lot of new things but the one we are obsessed with is JIT (just in time compiler). It is the first time that PHP version has a compiler – JIT – that caches a version of your already interpreted code and generates a machine code as an output (machine code is on with 0’s and 1’s only). The “just in time” compiler promises speed improvements for complex tasks and algorithms and opens new opportunities for the PHP language to broaden its reach and applications. 

Some of you may wonder how JIT relates to the Opcache, which brought significant performance gains to many websites? The main job of the Opcache is to cut the processes of tokenization, parsing, and compiling of Opcodes, which then get processed by the Zend engine. The role of JIT is to save on the execution of the Opcodes by the Zend engine, so it joins forces and intervenes to spare resources where the Opcache cannot help.

It’s worth mentioning a few downsides we have noticed so far:

• Running PHP 8 with JIT might make it harder for you to troubleshoot code errors because it may be harder to locate which piece of your code in this interpreted version is actually at fault.
• If you are running a WordPress site you may not be able to note significant performance improvements thanks to JIT. The WP developers are still working on making WP compatible with PHP 8 and are now calling for testers, meaning you won’t be really able to Test PHP8 on your WP site right away. Also, because of the way WP interacts with MySQL, a lot of the waiting time does not come from the PHP compilation, but from the MySQL response time, which cannot be solved with the help of the JIT compiler.  

Code with higher quality 

One of the major differences that you will notice is that many of the warnings and notices that weren’t catchable are now exceptions or errors, which can be caught and logged. It is possible that due to this change, a lot of problems that remained hidden with the previous PHP versions will now surface. This is a great improvement, as it will allow developers to spot potential issues easier. However,  have in mind that it may be a good idea to set display_errors=Off if you decide to use PHP 8 on a live site to not show such errors to your site visitors.

Cleaner, shorter code

Some of the new elements, such as the nullsafe operator, greatly improve the readability of the code, making it shorter and neater.  Instead of nesting several “if’s” you can use the “null” operator to write all those in just 1 line of code. 

The “type” trend

For several versions now, PHP has been trying to define the arguments that each method could adapt and become more of a typed language. In this latest release, there is a feature called “union types” which allows you to define 2 value types for each function, which is a natural continuation of that trend. As the example below shows, the function can return an integer or a float: 

public function getNumber(): int|float {
return $this->number;
}

The list of new features keeps going and we suggest this article as a good reference point for PHP developers:

https://stitcher.io/blog/new-in-php-8
https://stitcher.io/blog/php-jit
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/nullsafe_operator

How to take advantage of PHP 8 on our platform?

All our clients can change the PHP version of their sites from their control panel – For Managed WordPress Clients, Go to your Control Panel, Select PHP Settings, Then change the version – For Shared hosting, cPanel Control Panel –> MultiPHP Manager to change your PHP Version. With PHP8 still being a Release Candidate, we strongly advise that you do not enable it for your live sites, but run tests with it on our staging environment (Staging environments can be created on any plan, If you have trouble doing this, please feel free to reach out to our support team for information on how to do this.), or create copies of your sites in your accounts if you do not have the staging functionality. 

Currently unavailable in PHP 8

The following extensions and modules are not currently available for PHP 8:

• PHP-PSR
• Snuffleupagus
• Phalcon 4
• ionCube 10
• Memcache
• SourceGuardian

Incompatible with PHP 8

The following software currently does not work with PHP 8. This list is not comprehensive.

• DSO — cPanel & WHM does not support the DSO handler with PHP 8.
• The XMLRPC extensions — This extension moved to PECL.
• The JSON extension — This functionality is included in PHP 8 by default.

Begin learning PHP

Get started learning PHP at these great locations:

• https://jobtensor.com/Tutorial/PHP/en/Introduction

Tell us what you think

We tried to give you the big picture of what the new PHP 8 is all about. Now we would like to hear what you actually think about it, once you get the chance to try it out. What do you like and what do you dislike? How does it work on your website? Do you see any performance improvements? We are looking to explore how our more experienced users take advantage of this early release candidate before it becomes official.