I completely agree with you about the ease of hosting with PHP.

In fact, it's baffling that other popular languages for web development - such as Python and Ruby - have failed to address this issue of easy server installation. Developers underestimate how important this is.

If you want to sell a self-hosted solution to your customers, especially if they are small or medium-size businesses, it's impossible to offer an easy self-install solution using other languages (i.e. easy enough for non-technical users to follow instructions for install success).

Having a ridiculously easy web app installation process for servers would unlock countless opportunities for developers to reach more users or customers.

Programmer Jeff Attwood wrote about this in a critical post about PHP:

"If you want to produce free-as-in-whatever code that runs on virtually every server in the world with zero friction or configuration hassles, PHP is damn near your only option."

Attwood goes on to say we should:

"build compelling alternatives and make sure these alternatives are equally pervasive, as easy to set up and use as possible." [1]

That was written in 2012. And yet here we are in 2017 and there is still no other language that matches PHP for ease of server install, or for choice of hosting providers. I repeat: developers underestimate how important this is.

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-php-singularity/

This. When I got my first explanation of "serverless" (i.e. the details of the runtime and server are managed by the vendor for you) I almost laughed and said "Oh, like PHP on shared hosting."

I've wondered for years where else this aspect of PHP might be appreciated and show up in another ecosystem. In retrospect it almost seems obvious that it'd more likely appear in the form of convergent evolution combining another benefit that's higher status in the industry if less frequently needed.

Are you referring to shared webhosting?

Because if so, there's quite a few drawbacks. You're generally not in any sort of scalable setup, no high availability, you're on a shared box with other customers, you are susceptible to IO constraints on the shared disks, etc. You're still going to need a database of some sort for most applications....

> You're generally not in any sort of scalable setup, no high availability, you're on a shared box with other customers, you are susceptible to IO constraints on the shared disks, etc.

As you describe acceptable use-case for 99% of all projects.

I get your point but also consider that messing around with installing php extensions and using pecl is more of a nuisance than just deploying your node_modules via something like rsync. The php community solves this by writing polyfill which seems like wasted effort (writing something in php that already exists as a php extension)

I don't think pecl sees much use now, depending on your package manager you can just install most modules from there ("apt-get install php-imagick")

PHP isn't serverless in the same way a lambda function is at all. You still need to host something that responds to HTTP requests and passes them along appropriately to PHP. Just because it has a share nothing model doesn't mean you don't need to provision servers. You still need to do 90% of the work.

I think he meant you can easily find $5 "unlimited" php web hosts. So for all intents and purposes it's serverless as in you can use it on a shared web host, where you do not have to manage the server because the hosting company does it. Not that it's literally serverless. Even lambda uses servers obviously. They just abstract it away which is what he meant. Clearly all cloud offerings are backed by servers, it's just abstracted away to varying degrees

For $5 a month you can get a Linode VPS with 1GM RAM. After the one-off learning curve of Docker you can image these servers and get much more for your money than what any shared hosting provider has to offer. Better still, you're not tied to PHP either.

You're missing the point. The shared PHP host can be $5-$20 per year and handle bursts in excess of 1GB (assuming you're not grossly oversold, which is also common in VPSs).