When our Technical Director launched PHP Vitals at WordCamp Brisbane, he described the Web Hosting industry as a “race to the bottom”. This was not exactly an outsider’s perspective because, as well as being the team behind PHP Vitals, we’re also a Web Hosting company called Webslice (with antipodean sister companies called SiteHost and MyHost). In fact, our Technical Director is one of the guys who started this company, and our original founders still own and run the business a couple of decades later.
So why would we describe our own industry in such a bleak way? And why would we build a tool like PHP Vitals, with a leaderboard that might show someone else on top?
The answers to both of these questions come back to transparency—or perhaps a lack of it. If you’ve ever shopped around for Web Hosting or a VPS, you’ll know what we mean. No matter how hard you read hosting companies’ websites and reviews, you can never really know what you’re going to get.
When you measure your PHP performance with PHP Vitals, you’re seeing how fast PHP runs on the tech stack that runs your website. That stack starts with hardware like CPU and storage (disc), then the virtualisation layer that splits that hardware up between multiple customers, then layers of software like your operating system (probably Linux, maybe Windows), web server (e.g. Apache), database (e.g. MySQL or MariaDB) and programming language (definitely PHP).
In most Web Hosting set-ups, you don’t have a lot of control over this tech stack. It’s your host’s job to look after it. You might be able to change versions of PHP, but you definitely can’t tinker with the virtualisation. That’s alright though, because you’re paying for experts to take care of the complicated stuff.
So you might think that you, as the paying customer, would be able to know everything about that stack before you sign up. For example, it would be nice to read exactly what hardware you’ll have access to, and how much of it.
But in the real world, that’s not how it works. There are quite a few reasons for this, some more justifiable than others.
Web Hosts Know That You Don’t Know
The race to the bottom in Web Hosting exists because transparency doesn’t. Hosting companies know that you can’t tell exactly how fast (or secure, or well-maintained) their products are. Rather than trying to be the quickest, it’s easier to win customers if you appear to be the cheapest, or if your brand is more memorable, or if you’re easier to google. The race to the bottom is fuelled by cost-cutting, loss-leading, aggressive marketing, and unfriendly upsell strategies.
This is why big-name hosting companies have Web Hosting packages with single-figure introductory prices that grow exponentially after the first few months. It’s why support comes from unhelpful chatbots. It’s why one or two massive corporations own dozens of the most recognisable brands in the industry.
Like we said at the start, we’re a Web Hosting company too. One that’s still run independently, by our founders. We don’t like the idea of degrading the customer experience just to save money. We’re not in business to snap up competitors. We don’t put surprise additions into shopping carts. We believe in running quality hardware and working hard to build and maintain good systems.
PHP Vitals Puts Real Data At Your Service
PHP Vitals takes any server, whether it’s in a giant farm run by one of the world’s biggest companies or a VPS from your mate’s company down the road, and runs the same set of objective tests. It isn’t taken in by amazing one-off deals, or by shiny marketing, or by cool branding. It adds transparency to an industry where too many customer relationships are too one-sided. That’s why we built it.
We want a fair fight. That’s all.