In the early 2000s, everyone in my bubble knew that PHP was a security nightmare, only seconded by Flash. In the meantime, Adobe gave up on Flash, but PHP is still alive and rocking.
How did that happen? Did PHP get some serious makeover? Do developers just not care?
Some things got better. The magic variables, the killer feature which popularized PHP and also introduced the most vulnerabilities, has been gone for more than a decade. It’s not nearly as easy to accidentally make a vulnerability now. WordPress is still horrific, though.
But the reason PHP is still around is simple: There’s not much competition.
mod_phpis still by far the most convenient way to run shared hosting. You just install the module, and people can put .php files on their website and it just works. No need to set up FastCGI, some servlet engine, reverse proxy or any of that jazz you need when using python, ruby or node.js.Sure, if you’re running your own VM somewhere, you can set all that up, but a lot of people are still on cheap, shared hosting, where all they can do is upload files via FTP. The only real scripting language which doesn’t need any server software configured is PHP, so that’s what those hosting providers support.
I mean you still need to configure the webserver to handle PHP (Apache, Nginx, or whatever). It’s not active by default.
But of course for a webhoster that’s really easy at least.
Sure, I guess I should have phrased that as “any additional server software beyond the webserver itself”, but it’s kind of a mouthful. And people would still get after me in the comments, because actually, that’s technically true for CGI as well, although the poor performance makes it a no-go for anyone doing anything commercially.
Thanks! That’s the sort of answer that I hoped for.
Have you ever seen how shared hosting works for some of the languages you mentioned? For Node for instance it’s the same as PHP, you upload an index.js and that’s it.
I may be out of date on node.js. What is the price point for that? I’d imagine they’ll have to fire up a separate interpreter for each customer? I’d expect that to be more expensive.
The point here wasn’t really the user experience, though, but what is cheap and easy to support for a company providing bottom-tier shared hosting.
It’s not more expensive. Shared hosting pick a fixed capacity and they try to cram as many customers as possible per shard. That includes shenanigans like putting two resource-intensive accounts on one shard and 50 low-resource accounts on another even though they’re all paying for the same tier.
Yes with Node you have a process per account but it’s easier and cleaner to manage resource limits like that. I will take managing shared Node hosting over PHP any day, it’s much easier and more secure.
Overall the cost of shared hosting with Node or PHP is the same, what you don’t do is offer both at once because it complicates things. Typically you let customers choose the backend language option (PHP, Python, Node) and a database engine (MySQL, Postgres, Mongo) and that’s it.