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In the mid-00s the main selling point of PHP were shared hostings with mod_php which was a cheap way to host your own web site and database. Now with the cloud

In the mid-00s the main selling point of PHP were shared hostings with mod_php which was a cheap way to host your own web site and database. Now with the cloud that advantage is utterly gone.

systemvoltage 5y ago
I am not quite sure if Jamstack has improved anything. I feel like the entire web stack is spinning wheels and hardly progressing.
- dgb23 5y ago
  It's moving somewhere from "not quite there yet" to "substantial, qualitative improvement" as we speak. I'm following what happens in that space with React/Node based things like Next, and Redwood (soon v1.0), and others. The building blocks are there and the integrations get better and better. The big win of those will be tighter frontend and development integrations that are just not as feasible with a different language stack (PHP/Laravel, Python/Django, Ruby/Rails).
deniska 5y ago
Shared hosts are still there, and are cheaper and much simpler to use than your average cloud based deployment. Some even support these new hipster programming languages ruby and python.
- JodieBenitez 5y ago
  "new hipster" programming languages: Python 1.0: January 1994 PHP 1.0: june 1995 Ruby 1.0: December 1996
  - deniska 5y ago
    Sure, but if we're talking about these languages being "socially acceptable" for writing websites, they arrived a bit later to the party than PHP. Granted, it still happened about a decade and a half ago, so I hoped the sarcasm using the word "new" would come through.
    - JodieBenitez 5y ago
      > I hoped the sarcasm using the word "new" would come through. It did ;-) . But I frequently meet devs (young and old) that believe Python, Ruby and others are "new" languages. So I think it's worth mentioning they are not in any way. Of course age does not equate maturity. Neither social acceptance.
cutler 5y ago
Most of those cheap hosts served PHP via FastCGI not mod_php.
pjmlp 5y ago
For my tiny website there is nothing that cloud brings other than being more costly. I have the same access to my shared hosting, and the amount of money per year is peanuts.
- tempodox 5y ago
  Same here. None of my web projects is designed for a larger audience, hence the biggest advantage of my tiny public Linux host is that it has a fixed cost. An HN “hug of death” would bring the respective application server, and possibly the whole machine, to its knees.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  It very much depends on how code is written. A typical LAMP (style) stack wouldn't be any better on the cloud than it would on shared hosting. But if you can make use of serverless (eg lambda, S3 and/or DynamoDB on AWS) then that's where you'll start seeing some advantages. https://murex.rocks https://murex.rocks is a static site that costs me pennies each month and has zero scaling issues. The site is fully automated too, built from CI/CD (Markdown converted to HTML) upon commits to a master git branch. But it was purposely designed to run on the cloud. This isn't to say that shared hosting isn't a worthwhile option, just that cloud can be cheap albeit you do need to architect your project for using the cloud rather than lifting and shifting your existing LAMP stack and expecting that to behave the same.
sdze 5y ago
PHP still has a vibrant ecosystem. 1) cost 2) simplicity 3) scalability With the advent of Chinese frameworks that solve C1000K problems like swoole, workerman and so on it even found its place as high performance interactive backend server.
- sshine 5y ago
  I spent the better part of 2021 porting a PHP app to Kubernetes. If there’s one thing PHP is not, it is performant.
  - sdze 5y ago
    Then you will have a lot of fun paying those VMs when you use ruby or python.
  - heurisko 5y ago
    PHP is performant compared to other similar scripting languages, and in any case, the database is usually the bottleneck. If you look at the "multiple queries" results of the web framework benchmarks, you'll notice that the frameworks that use blocking database drivers have similar numbers e.g. raw Symfony is 13,543, whilst Spring is 15,979, despite the JRE being much, much faster. https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=ph&test=query https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=...

In the mid-00s the main selling point of PHP were shared hostings with mod_php which was a cheap way to host your own web site and database. Now with the cloud that advantage is utterly gone.

systemvoltage 5y ago

I am not quite sure if Jamstack has improved anything. I feel like the entire web stack is spinning wheels and hardly progressing.

dgb23 5y ago
It's moving somewhere from "not quite there yet" to "substantial, qualitative improvement" as we speak. I'm following what happens in that space with React/Node based things like Next, and Redwood (soon v1.0), and others. The building blocks are there and the integrations get better and better. The big win of those will be tighter frontend and development integrations that are just not as feasible with a different language stack (PHP/Laravel, Python/Django, Ruby/Rails).

deniska 5y ago

Shared hosts are still there, and are cheaper and much simpler to use than your average cloud based deployment. Some even support these new hipster programming languages ruby and python.

JodieBenitez 5y ago
"new hipster" programming languages: Python 1.0: January 1994 PHP 1.0: june 1995 Ruby 1.0: December 1996
- deniska 5y ago
  Sure, but if we're talking about these languages being "socially acceptable" for writing websites, they arrived a bit later to the party than PHP. Granted, it still happened about a decade and a half ago, so I hoped the sarcasm using the word "new" would come through.
  - JodieBenitez 5y ago
    > I hoped the sarcasm using the word "new" would come through. It did ;-) . But I frequently meet devs (young and old) that believe Python, Ruby and others are "new" languages. So I think it's worth mentioning they are not in any way. Of course age does not equate maturity. Neither social acceptance.

cutler 5y ago

Most of those cheap hosts served PHP via FastCGI not mod_php.

pjmlp 5y ago

For my tiny website there is nothing that cloud brings other than being more costly. I have the same access to my shared hosting, and the amount of money per year is peanuts.

tempodox 5y ago
Same here. None of my web projects is designed for a larger audience, hence the biggest advantage of my tiny public Linux host is that it has a fixed cost. An HN “hug of death” would bring the respective application server, and possibly the whole machine, to its knees.
hnlmorg 5y ago
It very much depends on how code is written. A typical LAMP (style) stack wouldn't be any better on the cloud than it would on shared hosting. But if you can make use of serverless (eg lambda, S3 and/or DynamoDB on AWS) then that's where you'll start seeing some advantages. https://murex.rocks https://murex.rocks is a static site that costs me pennies each month and has zero scaling issues. The site is fully automated too, built from CI/CD (Markdown converted to HTML) upon commits to a master git branch. But it was purposely designed to run on the cloud. This isn't to say that shared hosting isn't a worthwhile option, just that cloud can be cheap albeit you do need to architect your project for using the cloud rather than lifting and shifting your existing LAMP stack and expecting that to behave the same.

sdze 5y ago

PHP still has a vibrant ecosystem. 1) cost 2) simplicity 3) scalability With the advent of Chinese frameworks that solve C1000K problems like swoole, workerman and so on it even found its place as high performance interactive backend server.

sshine 5y ago
I spent the better part of 2021 porting a PHP app to Kubernetes. If there’s one thing PHP is not, it is performant.
- sdze 5y ago
  Then you will have a lot of fun paying those VMs when you use ruby or python.
- heurisko 5y ago
  PHP is performant compared to other similar scripting languages, and in any case, the database is usually the bottleneck. If you look at the "multiple queries" results of the web framework benchmarks, you'll notice that the frameworks that use blocking database drivers have similar numbers e.g. raw Symfony is 13,543, whilst Spring is 15,979, despite the JRE being much, much faster. https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=ph&test=query https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=...