Hasin Hayder has put together a list of cloud hosting providers that are already set and ready to go for PHP applications. His list highlights a few of the free ones.

I will be focusing on some of these free cloud hosting options available out there. One thing to note before you proceed - these free cloud hosting options are very good to develop and test your applications (in dev+staging environment) and it may not be wise to deploy the production version of your application with any free plan (Except Amazon AWS's free tier, its production ready).

He has four different services on his list, ranging anywhere from small to industrial strength, depending on your needs:

• Amazon's AWS
• PHPFog
• PHPCloud (from Zend)
• Heroku (traditionally Ruby, now supports PHP too)

On the Ldeveloper Tech Blog today there's a helpful new post about an error PHP's SOAP extension could throw about not being able to connect to the host despite all settings being correct.

I receive this nasty error yesterday and it took me some time to figure out the problem: "Fatal error: Uncaught SoapFault exception: [HTTP] Could not connect to host in...". This ["new SoapClient"] line passes without any problems and this [var_dump on __getFunctions] shows the function prototypes correctly.

His script connects to the service as its supposed to but the "could not connect" is still thrown. He found a few references to OpenSSL issues that could cause it, but his code was correct so he turned to the other side - the service itself. As it turns out, it wasn't configured correctly.

It was configured to send invalid url and the function calls were using that invalid url. So there are two solutions [...] the first is to configure the server correctly. The other is to give __doReguest the correct location.

On CodeForest.net there's a new tutorial showing you how to set up a WAMP (Windows/Apache/MySQL/PHP) server that uses multiple virtual hosts.

Virtual hosting is a method for hosting multiple domain names on a computer using a single IP address. This allows one machine to share its resources, such as memory and processor cycles, to use its resources more efficiently. This is often found on shared hosting servers. [...] We can use Virtual hosts on Windows to deal with this problem. As I am using WAMP server for development, this tutorial will explain how to do it in WAMP, but other products are very similar, so you want have problems porting this.

They walk you through each step of the process, including any settings or configuration files changes you'll need to make along the way. Their configuration helps you set it up for your localhost, but it can be pretty easily moved over to a live server just by changing a few IP addresses.

DevShed continues their validation series today with this new tutorial, a look at validating URLs, host and paths with the filter extension bundled with PHP.

Validation process performed on URLs [in the previous part of the series] was pretty simplistic. Thus, in this sixth episode of the series I'm going to dig deeper into the usage of the FILTER_VALIDATE_URL filter to show you how to validate different portions of a URL, including its protocol, host and eventual paths.

They enforce the filtering by adding in the FILTER_FLAG_SCHEME_REQUIRED or FILTER_FLAG_HOST_REQUIRED flags to the filters to ensure the information is valid too (not just in the right format).

On the SitePoint.com Web Tech blog, Craig Buckler explains how you can test multiple PHP/MySQL/Apache websites on your local machine without having to change your Apache configuration each time - the magic of VirtualHosts.

It is rare to find a web developer with responsibility for just one website. In this article, we will configure your development PC so you can test any number of websites using a dedicated domain name for each one. You will require a local installation of Apache 2.2 and, optionally, PHP and MySQL.

He explains the only two parts you'll need to get it up and running - changes to your hosts file and updates to the Apache configuration file to add in VirtualHost records for each site. He also throws in a bonus tip about detecting which host the script is being used on via the $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] variable.

Kae Verens has a few tips to help simplify your life with your current content management system by using one code base to run multiple sites.

I haven't studied how other engines do it, but here's how I do it. First off, some benefits to sharing the CMS across separate sites: reduced resource usage, easier upgrades, easier bug-fixing. Convinced yet? Of course you are. Here's how you do it.

There's four steps to his process:

• Separate out the site-specific files from one another
• Serve all site-specific files out through a "proxy" script that can intelligently grab the needed ones based on the site
• Override the default configuration at request time (forcing it to use that "proxy" script)
• Create that proxy file that the web server can funnel the requests through (his example is included).

Mark Kimsal has posted part one of a new series he's working up on creating a virtual host control panel by pairing with PHP a few other technologies.

I still come across a person now and then who does not appreciate the power that any server control panel gives you. [...] They reduce the margin of error that a human can bring to the table when editing files and performing commands "by hand". If host control panels are so good, why would you want to write your own control panel when there are so many out there already? Well, the answer is, there aren't any open source ones.

He talks about starting out right by defining the build and the technology to use and only then gets started coding. His application uses the Cognify framework, SQLite, Nanoweb and, of course, PHP. At the end of this part of the series, you'll have the framework set up and a sample module in place to mess with.

Jacques Marneweck points out a tutorial he came across showing how to perform an installation of the PEAR library system on a shared host.

This is quite useful when you are forced into using a clueless shared host who only have the bare PEAR installation on their servers, and have not ever considered installing DB, Mail, Net_SMTP, etc. which lots of people use instead of reinventing the wheel with each project.

The steps of the tutorial are pretty simple and they include two different ways - installing it to your docroot directory if the web host already has the pear binary set up or using ftp/ftps/sftp to upload and install the needed files.

The "Ramblecast" from this year's php|tek 2007 conference has been edited and poasted by the guys over at the Pro::PHP Podcast. Guests for this edition of the RambleCast included:

• Paul Reinhimer
• Sean Coates
• Sara Golemon
• Terry Chay
• Ed Finkler

Oh, and don't forget to read Sean's disclaimers when you listen to the show. You'll take it all a little less seriously and enjoy the ride a little bit more.

Nexen.net has posted the latest PHP statistics for the month of March 2007 today including the PHP version distribution, the usage of different versions of PHP, PHP 5 adoption by country, and much more.

Here are the PHP stats for March 2007. To learn about methodology, read la section phpversion. 10.1 millions servers hosted on 2.3 millions IP were surveyed during December, and 22.8 were used for stats : domaines without web sites, those unreachable, ISP, shared hosters or domain parkings were not considered.

Also included are the evolution statistics comparing PHP to two other languages - ASP amd Masque. Interestingly enough, the growth pattern almost directly matches the inverse of the ASP results.