If you've ever explored for web hosting service, you would have definitely observed that many hosting companies provide not just hosting for static HTML pages but they also give PHP support. Almost all web hosting companies that come with PHP support also give an access to the MySQL databases. There are sites demanding these supports and also many that can go without them. This article tells which types of sites demand MySQL and PHP hosting plan and what can any free hosting provider can provide you in its MySQL/PHP hosting plan.

Who needs MySQL/PHP hosting?

PHP and MySQL support is mandatory, if you have planned to run any CMS (content management system) like joomla, mambo or wordress blog. These systems will allow you to run your site without editing its HTML code. Client is just required to set up the CMS script or employ a web hosting company that provides pre-installed scripts. After installing the script, the site content is added from the admin area. Webmaster will fill different fields such as page title and page content and the script will use PHP language to save this information in the MySQL database. When visitors come on the site, the PHP fetches the information from MySQL and creates the page for the visitor.

Forums also require PHP and MySQL support. Database stores names of all the registered users, their passwords and posts. PHP and MySQL allow users to post messages and edit them anytime. Most commonly used free forum scripts are PhpBB, Simple Machines Forum and PunBB. Guestbook is a best solution that websites, running big discussion with their visitors, use to allow their visitors to post messages on their website. Contact forms are also very much in use. Site-owners, who don’t want to reveal their e-mail addresses and other account information to avoid spam in their mailbox, use mailform.

Basic features you can get in any free PHP and MySQL hosting plan
You not allowed to install MySQL or PHP if you just have a web hosting account; the reason is installing these means system will make broad changes throughout on the server. Therefore it is essential, to own a server so that you can install PHP and MySQL. By registering for a free web hosting account, sometimes you will get one MySQL database and that is the all you may need; one database can work for any of your purposes. The only reason, why people seek hosting providers offering “50 MySQL” or “100 MySQL” databases, is that they actually do not want to use hundreds of PHP scripts with single database. Most probably, the hosting provider will offer PHP, but sometimes they do not and just support HTML. Moreover, with more powerful free web hosting companies you can even get “control panel access”. This implies you will be able to create, edit and delete almost every section of your web hosting account, like protecting different directories and creating MySQL databases, and telling you how much bandwidth is in-use; but for this facility you will need to have few corporate programs, such as cPanel, or zPanel. But, this is not with most of the free hosts. However, despite its usefulness, it is not essential to have a “web hosting control panel” to make your website a big success and well established.

A very basic offer, you will get from any free PHP and MySQL hosting provider, generally includes the following features:

• PHP support.
• At least ONE MySQL database.
• PHPMyAdmin.
• One FTP account.