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title, isChild, anchor
| title | isChild | anchor |
|---|---|---|
| Virtual or Dedicated Servers | true | virtual_or_dedicated_servers |
Virtual or Dedicated Servers
If you are comfortable with systems administration, or are interested in learning it, virtual or dedicated servers give you complete control of your application's production environment.
nginx and PHP-FPM
PHP, via PHP's built-in FastCGI Process Manager (FPM), pairs really nicely with nginx, which is a lightweight, high-performance web server. It uses less memory than Apache and can better handle more concurrent requests. This is especially important on virtual servers that don't have much memory to spare.
Apache and PHP
PHP and Apache have a long history together. Apache is wildly configurable and has many available modules to extend functionality. It is a popular choice for shared servers and an easy setup for PHP frameworks and open source apps like WordPress. Unfortunately, Apache uses more resources than nginx by default and cannot handle as many visitors at the same time.
Apache has several possible configurations for running PHP. The most common and easiest to setup is the prefork MPM
with mod_php. While it isn't the most memory efficient, it is the simplest to get working and to use. This is probably
the best choice if you don't want to dig too deeply into the server administration aspects. Note that if you use
mod_php you MUST use the prefork MPM.
Alternatively, if you want to squeeze more performance and stability out of Apache then you can take advantage of the same FPM system as nginx and run the worker MPM or event MPM with mod_fastcgi or mod_fcgid. This configuration will be significantly more memory efficient and much faster but it is more work to set up.
If you are running Apache 2.4 or later, you can use mod_proxy_fcgi to get great performance that is easy to setup.