Lorna Mitchell has a new post today sharing some helpful hints to help you pick a good PHP hosting provider for your next application or website.

I've been thinking a lot about the state of hosting in PHP lately, mostly as a result of working with a few different clients on their setups (including one that bought brand new hosting a month ago and got a PHP 5.3.3 platform), and also being at DrupalCon and meeting a community who is about to make a big change to their minimum requirements. With that in mind, here are my thoughts and tips on choosing hosting.

She starts off with one of the bigger criteria she looks for in a host: the minimum PHP version available (some might have more than one, especially some PaaS). She suggests that even things like PHP 5.3 should be considered too old and should be passed over in favor of newer releases like 5.5 or even 5.6. She then talks about some of the benefits that come from using a newer platform and the current levels of adoption and performance by PHP version. Finally, she includes an unofficial list of hosts that have set themselves out as good, solid PHP-friendly providers, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

In case you hadn't heard by now, the symfony project's components sub-project of the main framework has gotten its own website:

Some time ago, I have introduced the new "Symfony Components" project. It is a sub-project of Symfony that aims to give more importance to some of the great libraries we have developed for Symfony. [...] Today, I am happy to announce that the Symfony Components now have their dedicated website.

Each of the current components (YAML, Event Dispatcher, Dependency Injection, Template - though the last three are "coming soon") have documentation, info about the API, examples of how to install and use it and how to give back to the code for the component directly.

On the NETTUTS.com website today Alex Villmann walks you through setting up a dedicated web server running Ubuntu, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

All great websites have a great server behind them. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to set up a dedicated web server (with Apache, MySQL, and PHP) using that old computer you have lying around the house and some free software.

The tutorial comes with plenty of screenshots for the Ubuntu install as well as the changes you'll need to make to the configuration files for the software to get things up and running. In the end you'll have a dedicated server you can drop anywhere and use to host your site.

Jacob Santos makes some of his own comments about the recent PHP5 adoption talk that's been going around in the PHP community (spurred on by comments made by Matt of the Wordpress project).

Matt brings up some good points. What might be limiting PHP 5 adoption, could just be the lack of interest in developers. [...] Up until reading his rant, I've lived in a box where everyone I've talked to, used and enjoyed PHP 5 and its vast extensions. Developing in PHP 5.0 was uneventfully, but you learn to appreciate PHP 5 with the core inclusion of PDO with PHP 5.1. PHP 5 is not without annoyances. In the core developers attempts to "better" the language, they made changes that broke code that previously worked.

He looks at a few of the items for debate surrounding the move from PHP4 to PHP5 including the extensions that come bundled with PHP5, solving the register_globals issue, and a brief mention of the Standard PHP Library.

Jacob Santos makes some of his own comments about the recent PHP5 adoption talk that's been going around in the PHP community (spurred on by comments made by Matt of the Wordpress project).

Matt brings up some good points. What might be limiting PHP 5 adoption, could just be the lack of interest in developers. [...] Up until reading his rant, I've lived in a box where everyone I've talked to, used and enjoyed PHP 5 and its vast extensions. Developing in PHP 5.0 was uneventfully, but you learn to appreciate PHP 5 with the core inclusion of PDO with PHP 5.1. PHP 5 is not without annoyances. In the core developers attempts to "better" the language, they made changes that broke code that previously worked.

He looks at a few of the items for debate surrounding the move from PHP4 to PHP5 including the extensions that come bundled with PHP5, solving the register_globals issue, and a brief mention of the Standard PHP Library.

Pierre-Alain Joye has made an update to his information about building Cairo on Windows with more fixes and the creation of a dedicated page for the project.

I fixed a possible issue with PDF and PS support, it should work way better now. The cairo_build_windows archive has been updated and a decent freetype2 is now included (from gnuwin32). The build system has been tested with VC++ Express and VC.net 2003. Also a configure.bat is now included, it is a simple "alias" for "cscript /nologo configure.js ". You can call it just like any real configure.

As mentioned, a project homepage has been set up for cairo-win32, and can be found here along with some results of it: PNG file, PDF file.

Pierre-Alain Joye has made an update to his information about building Cairo on Windows with more fixes and the creation of a dedicated page for the project.

I fixed a possible issue with PDF and PS support, it should work way better now. The cairo_build_windows archive has been updated and a decent freetype2 is now included (from gnuwin32). The build system has been tested with VC++ Express and VC.net 2003. Also a configure.bat is now included, it is a simple "alias" for "cscript /nologo configure.js ". You can call it just like any real configure.

As mentioned, a project homepage has been set up for cairo-win32, and can be found here along with some results of it: PNG file, PDF file.