I had a small PHP script I wanted to share with a friend. Nothing fancy — no framework, no build step, just a handful of .php files that needed to live somewhere reachable by a URL.
Every "real" option I looked at wanted me to provision a VPS, install and patch PHP and a database by hand, and generate my own TLS certs before I could even see the thing running. That's a lot of setup for a weekend project.
What I used instead
I ended up on phphost — PHP hosting built around one idea: you already know how to write PHP, you shouldn't need to know Linux to ship it.
The deploy is genuinely just:
- Upload a folder, a zip, or connect a git repo
- It sets up the PHP runtime and HTTPS automatically
- Your site is live at a working HTTPS URL in under 10 seconds
No config file, no shell to open.
What's actually included
- Automatic HTTPS on every site, from the first deploy
- Cron jobs, if you need something running on a schedule
- MySQL support and per-site
.envvariables for secrets - Staging environments — a persistent pre-prod copy that doesn't count against your site limit
- Deploy history with one-click rollbacks
- Uptime monitoring that pings your site and tells you before a user does