Web Hosting with Php: What's the? in the Url?
Contributed by Deb Powers
WHO's watching your Website? Try the Cool Free Website Monitor!
We've been using this awesome webmaster service for a while now and we absolutely love it... In two minutes, your website will be under the watchful eye of a distributed node network. Very cool for you!
Web Hosting with Php: What's the? in the Url?
Most paid web hosting accounts, and quite a few free ones these days, offer support for PHP. If it was just 'something that came with the account' - just another bunch of letters in the alphabet soup - you may not be aware of the power it puts at your fingertips. What's PHP and what can it do for you?
How do I know if my web hosting account supports PHP?
The simplest way to check if your web hosting account supports PHP is a very simple script. Copy the following line into a blank text file:
<? php phpinfo();? >
That's all that should be in the file. Save it with the name phpinfo.php, then upload it to your server. Now open a browser and type
http://www.<yourdomainname>.com/phpinfo.php
If your hosting account supports PHP, you'll get a page that lists all the PHP settings for your server.
My web hosting account supports PHP - what can I do with it?
PHP stands for Preprocessing Hypertext language - a scripting language that can do almost anything that CGI (Common Gateway Interface) or PERL or any other web language can do. The difference between PHP and other languages is that you can embed PHP directly into your documents - so there's no need to call outside scripts to run your code or write new web pages to display the results. Or, more simply, you can write PHP right into your web pages by using simple tags.
You don't actually need to know any PHP at all to use it. There are hundreds, if not thousands of PHP scripts that you can download for free and install on your web hosting server. They include shopping carts, message boards, content management systems, guest books, content publishers, email responders and so much more.
A simple PHP script you can try
In the meantime, if you'd like to try a simple script, here's one that will help you understand how PHP creates dynamic pages. For a very simple example of what PHP can do, cut and paste the following code into a blank text document.
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>PHP SNIPPET</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<? PHP
echo "<BODY bgcolor=" . $color . " text=" . $texcolor . " >";
? >
More »
- Read our comparison of leading web hosting companies
- Tips from a web veteran - "Nut Hosting in a Web Shell"
- A freakishly hot web-hosting deal: DreamHost is already a top performer in web hosting -- but now they are offering a TeraByte of bandwidth for under $8!
Copy and paste this code:
