PHP based website
Table of contents : 
The beginning of PHP
PHP was initially introduced back in 1995 as a collection of Perl scripts, compiled in C. It steadily gathered popularity even with its early versions, and in just 4 years it reached amazing results for such a newly developed language - 1 million domain names were using PHP for their websites. This number grew steadily and by the time PHP 4 was introduced in the year 2000, there were nearly 5 million users with PHP based websites. And after the PHP 4 release, this number skyrocketed and currently there are more than 20 million sites using PHP.PHP based websites
PHP is now the primary platform for web applications, even though the PHP language is a lot younger than the other competitors. What gives it that special edge is the ease of use and friendliness of the language - it's simple to understand and creating websites with it is quite easy. Today, it's a base for almost all of the popular free scripts used for blogs, forums and e-commerce solutions, and in a recent statistic research it was determined that all popular blogs run on a PHP designed system.The advantages of a PHP website
- Database interactions
One of the great advantages of PHP is the ability to interact with databases. Its latest releases have the ability to interact with almost every database software used. The most popular combination is PHP with MySQL as the database software. This is a very popular and powerful combination, the proof for which can be found in the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) package - a ready to go package for web servers.
MySQL database manipulations:
<?php
// Connecting, selecting database
$link = mysql_connect('dbhost', 'dbuser', 'dbpassword')
or die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
mysql_select_db('my_database');
// Performing SQL query
$query = 'SELECT first_name, last_name, address FROM people';
$result = mysql_query($query)
or die('Query failed: ' . mysql_error());
// Printing result
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
echo "First Name:" .$row['first_name']
.", Last Name:".$row['last_name']
.", Address:".$row['address']. <br> ;
}
// Free resultset
mysql_free_result($result);
// Closing connection
mysql_close($link);
?> - Platform independence
Another advantage of having your website in PHP is that PHP is a software independent language and applications written in PHP can be used on any software platform. At the moment of the release of PHP 5, PHP was already available for systems running Linux, Windows, Mac OS, Sun's Solaris, IBM AIX, HP-UX, FreeBSD, Novell Netware, SGI IRIX, IBM AS/400, OS/2, RISC OS. Due to the fact that PHP is open-source, there are also releases for exotic environments, such as Amiga OS and BeOS.
PHP based index file:
<?php
include('configure.php');
$content = new Content('home');
?>
<html>
<head>
<title><?php echo $content->title; ?></title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="header"><?php include('header.php'); ?></div>
<h1>My Home Page</h1>
<?php echo $content->text; ?>
...
<div id="footer"><?php include('footer.php'); ?></div>
</body>
</html> - Huge corporate support
Last, but not least, due to its high popularity, PHP has gained the support of some of the major software market players, such as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft. With such companies behind the PHP language, you can rest assured that if you build your website in PHP, you will never run out of sources for information, upgrade and improvements.
NTC Hosting and PHP
NTC Hosting offers its clients an ultimate web hosting solution. If you want to host a PHP-based application, we'll provide you with the possibility to choose the proven PHP4, or to easily upgrade to the newer PHP5. Also, NTC Hosting offers experimental support for the still-under-development PHP6. Another special bonus for our clients is the opportunity to easily configure PHP according to their website's needs by means of a custom php.ini file, which comes with our web hosting plans.Given the above-mentioned features: secure and fast servers, PHP4, PHP5 and even PHP6 support, the customizable php.ini file, and the integrated system for the installation of more than 30 popular PHP scripts, NTC Hosting is the right choice for your PHP-based website.