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As you probably know, Virtual Hosting is system whereby many website are hosted on a single server, sometimes even located at a single IP address. For a more comprehensive description of Virtual Hosting, you can check out other posts on the topic here at a GoodHost.org. A PHP Virtual Host is, simply, is one of these partitioned parts of a server that host a domain on which PHP has been installed. What is less simple is understanding exactly what that means.
A PHP Virtual Host employs the PHP, or “Personal Home Page” scripting language to enable a subscribing webmaster to create dynamic web pages. A traditional web page is an HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) document, which is to say it is a static (which signifies unchanging) document that contains links to other, similar pages. For any of the content on such a page to change, the webmaster must manually change the code in the HTML file and upload that file to the server. That’s fine for many purposes, but if everything were done like that the Internet would really only be a collection of books and pamphlets similar to the print industry.
What sets the online medium apart is that it is dominated by sites that engage their audiences by allowing them to interact with the content and get continually updated information. PHP is one of the many scripting languages that make this dynamic quality of the online medium possible. A scripting language derives from the common use of the word “script” which is a document that directs a performance. A movie, for example, is scripted. The characters may appear to interact naturally, but they are filmed performing a predetermined script. A scripting language, similarly, is what allows web developers to plan out the steps performed by a computer before generating the final output, in this case an HTML code which is rendered into what we see as a webpage by an Internet browser.
One of the simplest dynamic features that can be incorporated into a webpage through the use of PHP is a counter. You may have seen web pages that display the number of hits they have received, or received on a given day, and this is achieved by a script that instructs the server to record an event each time the page is accessed. The number you see displayed in a counter is presented through HTML code, but before that code was delivered to your browser, the server processed the information, added “1″ to the number value in reference to the latest request, inserted that number into the final HTML code delivered to your browser.
What makes a script a script rather than a program is that it functions independently of the programs it is accessing, it sets the order in which programs are accessed and input the required data to get the desired results, then performs the next step in the scripted chain of events. Naturally, PHP has many more uses than generating a counter, but the example serves to illustrate how basic such scripts are to the experience we have of the Internet.
There are many other scripting languages out there, such as ASP (Active Server Pages), but PHP has been around for a long time and is popular for its simplicity. A PHP script can be contained in a basic text file, integrated, for example, into the same file containing regular HTML code and it will be processed by any PHP enabled server. A PHP Virtual Host is easy to come by and easy to implement, but it may be something you’ll need to have your webhost install for you.
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