On the CloudWays blog there's a new post with comments from several members of the PHP community about why they feel that managed cloud hosting is a better option when it comes to hosting their applications.

Not many people realize that their choice of hosting solution could determine the success or failure of their project. Even the best code base fails to perform to its maximum potential because of a hosting solution that fails to provide appropriate support.

[...] In order to understand why many industry leaders recommend managed cloud hosting for PHP projects, it is important to understand the benefits of these hosting solutions. In effect, managed cloud hosting offers three important benefits.

These three benefits involve the offloading of the usual hassles of server management, improved security and scalability. Members of the PHP community that contributed their opinions include:

• Anna Filina
• Adam Wathan
• Josh Lockhart
• Tessa Mero
• Matt Stauffer
• Manuel Lemos

Check out the full article to read their thoughts on why managed cloud hosting is the way forward.

The Delicious Brains site has posted the latest part in their "Hosting WordPress Yourself" series (originally started back in 2015). In this latest tutorial they update things based on the current status of the WordPress project and share some of the considerations that need to be made when self-hosting versus something like WordPress.com.

It’s been 2 years since I started writing the Hosting WordPress Yourself series, and in that time a lot has changed! If you had tried following along with the series recently you will probably have noticed that a few of the steps outlined in the articles no longer worked, or were no longer relevant. A few exciting new technologies and services have also been introduced over the last few years (e.g. PHP 7.1, Let’s Encrypt, HTTP/2) which can improve both the performance and security of your sites. As such, Brad suggested that I update the entire series to reflect what’s changed over the last couple of years.

The existing articles in this series have already been updated with the changes that follow. This article serves as a changelog and documents what’s changed in each article.

They then go through the major updates that need to be made to the previous advice covering including topics like:

• Setting Up a Virtual Server
• Installing Nginx, PHP and MariaDB
• Server Monitoring and Caching
• Cron, Email and Automatic Backups
• Nginx Security Tweaks, WooCommerce Caching, and Auto Server Updates

Check out the full post for the complete advice.

The TutsPlus.com site continues their "Build Your Startup with PHP" series of tutorials with the latest part of the series. In this most recent article they move into the hosting world and offer some tips and setup options for your production hosting.

In this tutorial, I'll explore choosing an ideal hosting platform for Meeting Planner and the initial configuration of our server. I'll be guiding you through the process as I migrate the pre-launch website to a better production environment for our upcoming alpha launch.

[...] As a reminder, all of the code for Meeting Planner is written in the Yii2 Framework for PHP. If you'd like to learn more about Yii2, check out our parallel series Programming With Yii2.

They start by looking at how to choose the right hosting company for your application and abilities. For their particular needs, they opted for managed hosting (like Rackspace or Digital Ocean). For the remainder of the tutorial, they show the setup with Digital Ocean and a simple "droplet" (virtual machine instance). They walk you through the setup of the droplet, the server configuration for hosting the application and packages to install. Then they check out and set up the code for the "Meeting Planner" application and, finally, update the DNS to point to the new server.

In this post to his site Djordje Kovacevic shares the results of his evaluation of hosting providers in the platform-as-a-service arena for hosting PHP applications: OpenShift, Heroku and Fortrabbit.

I want PHP 5.6+, so I did some basic testing of those services to pick cheep and good solution to host my blog. OpenShift because I use it and it's free for 3 small gears, it was pretty good solution few years ago. Heroku because I used it for Ruby on Rails projects and they support multiple languages (even multiple build packs for one project)! I used FortRabbit too, so I decided to test theirs new apps.

For his testing he used a simple Laravel (v5.2) application with a handful of routes - something simple just to test out the setup and deployment processes. There is a "tl;dr" of the results but he also gets a bit more in-depth on what each service has to offer and some of the pros and cons of each. He also includes the results of some basic performance testing on the instances, linking to the raw output if you'd like to run your own metrics against it.

On the Zend Developer Zone blog Daniel Berman has posted a guide showing how to use their Z-Ray plugin to inspect code running on Azure for statistics around performance, queries and errors thrown by the code.

Quick experimentation, easy collaboration, automated infrastructure and scalability, together with advanced diagnostic and analytical tools – all provide PHP developers with good reasons to develop in the cloud.

[...] The combination of Z-Ray and the Azure cloud means PHP developers building apps on the Azure web app service get the best of both worlds – Z-Ray’s powerful introspection capabilities and Azure’s rich cloud infrastructure.

The post walks you through the steps to create a new Azure-based web application, how to upload your code and enable the Z-Ray feature directly from the Azure "Tools" menu. The Z-Ray toolbar is then automatically injected into your application for your immediate profiling needs.

Rob Allen has a post to his site talking about using Composer with shared hosting, showing how to use this popular tool even if you're on a shared hosting environment and don't have direct SSH or shell access.

I've seen this sentiment a few times now, so this seems like a good time to point out that you do not need SSH access to your server in order to use Composer. In fact, I don't run Composer on a live server (regardless of whether it's using shared hosting) and it's not on my list of things to do in the near future.

What you do need is a process where you handle your Composer dependencies on your own computer where you have PHP running.

He gives two possible solutions to the problem: either commit your dependencies or create some kind of build script that can execute the Composer install for you on deploy. He gives details on both of these solutions including the process for installing the dependencies with an automated FTP script (run at deploy rather than committed).