What is PHP Hosting?

A web page is a document that can be accessed through a web browser and display on a monitor or mobile device. It can be retrieve from a local computer or from a remote web server. It is usually a simple text file with HTML or Hyper Text Markup Language tags that describes how the browser should format and display the text on the screen.

For example the type of font to use, the font size, color, background etc. It can also embed images and other elements such as audio and video and provide navigation via hypertext links.

A web server hosts the web page/s and it can respond to a browser's request for the page, and deliver the page to the web browser through the Internet.

For a pure HTML web page, the browser interpret the file that it receives from the browser, formats and display it on the screen - mobile or otherwise. Pure HTML web pages can be hosting on web servers running on any operating system e.g. Linux, Windows etc.

Pure HTML pages are also known as static pages. They do not change!

What are Dynamic Pages?

Dynamic (usually used in conjunction with a data base) web pages are created "on the fly" for visitors as they browse a website. Dynamic pages are created by the web server when a visitor defines a number of variables. The variables can include such things as product ID, product specs, session ID, language, geographic location, search terms, and so on. Often, these variables are selected by the visitor simply clicking links on the site.

Dynamic pages don't actually exist until they are requested by the user. This differs from static HTML pages which exist as individual files on the server. Dynamic pages are accomplished with server-side technology such as ASP, PHP, ColdFusion, etc.

What is PHP (or PHP Hypertext Preprocessor)?

PHP is an open source general purpose scripting language that is designed to produce dynamic web pages (e.g. login pages, shopping carts). It was at first created as a simple scripting platform called "Personal Home Page" hence PHP.

When a web visitor visits a web site or clicks on a link to a web page, the browser sends a request to the web server asking for the web page. In a typical scenario, the web server returns the page to the web browser with the understanding that the browser knows how to interpret and render the page as intended.

However since browsers cannot interpret a page containing PHP codes and HTML, the PHP codes needs to be decoded on the web server side first by a PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. The preprocessor executes the PHP codes and output the result in HTML. This HTML is combined with the original HTML source and returned to the browser. The browser receives a fully HTML pages and displays the page.