Web hosting is when someone that owns a server large enough to store a lot of data on it offers to share that server with other people who want to have web sites, but have no server to place the data on. Web hosting is a mutual agreement between the people that own the server, and the people that need the data stored.
All website hosting is not PHP web hosting, although PHP is a server scripting language that is used by more than two hundred million websites, and at least two million servers. PHP web hosting means that the server supports this server-side scripting language and can reproduce the data written in this language, as well as understand any data received in this language.
PHP web hosting stands for Hypertext Preprocessor, but in the early days of PHP code the PHP referred to Personal Home Page. The code is interpreted by servers that have a processor module designed to read and understand it.
PHP started in 1994 because the developer wrote a series of common gateway interface scripts for the purpose of managing his own personal homepage. The tools he designed were used to record the traffic on his webpages, and display items like his personal resume. This developer was Rasmus Lerdorf. His development for his personal home page has quickly become an improvement for a large portion of the websites on the internet.
The PHP code allows the sharing of data on forms like resumes to be done easily, where before the existence of PHP the sharing of data on forms was often very hard to accomplish. Not all servers understood a unilateral code so the forms did not make sense to them. In order to read forms from one server you had to make certain that you went and got the same processor that the form was written in. This was time consuming and irritating, so the invention of PHP made compute life easier.
Not all servers understand this code, so you will still run into the problem from time to time that your machine cannot understand something you are trying to access, but if you choose to use a server that has a processor capable of understanding the PHP code you will likely understand the majority of data located on the internet.
When you go to rent room from a web hosting service check and see if the server is PHP code compatible.
