fortrabbit blog

I have built an openly-licensed, ratings-free register of web hosting providers. Why?

A take on PHP application performance monitoring and meta-observability.

Why fortrabbit doesn't offer 1-click installers — and the local-first workflow we recommend for shipping real PHP projects.

A German company on American infrastructure serving a global customer base. On EU data sovereignty, and what European should mean.

An inbox full of AI-written cold outreach, collected over weeks and read closely. What the most sophisticated spam so far looks like.

Interactive interfaces without splitting the stack: how a modern PHP monolith competes with a decoupled headless architecture.

Decoupled systems with a JavaScript frontend and a PHP backend: what headless actually means, how it is built, and when it pays off.

Chrome holds around 65 percent of the browser market. What that concentration means for competition, privacy and web standards.

AI site builders generate code, content and layout in seconds. What that leaves for the people who build websites for a living.

It's complicated. The relation between open source and web hosting from our point of view

Action-oriented UX puts the verb first, closer to how people speak and think, instead of the object-first layouts most dashboards use.

Why the new fortrabbit platform drops horizontal scaling, a signature feature of the Pro Stack, and what replaces it.

PHP and JavaScript have grown apart. What is missing between them in 2024, seen from a company that hosts one and serves the other.

A field guide to image processing and optimization services: what problem they solve, which providers exist, and the alternatives.

The European Court of Justice invalidated the EU-US Privacy Shield. What that means for a hosting platform and for its clients.

PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0 deadlines: Why is so much old PHP around? What we will do!

Props to the OSS communities and highlighting some of our open source contributions.

Read, search, ask — how to write a support request that gets a useful answer quickly, and what makes hosting support slow down.

What transactional email services are for — confirmations, invoices, password resets — and which providers are worth a look.

Our real-live practices on auto-generated client e-mail communication.

Thoughts on flat file CMS and static site generators, mostly PHP-related.

HTTP/2 promised faster delivery. What measurements on a real PHP hosting platform actually showed, and where the gains went.

Insights why we will not offer an Add-On program soon and what we have instead

Is PaaS dead? Trends, pivots and troubles in PHP cloud hosting in 2015, seen from inside one of the companies competing in it.

A look at PHP e-commerce software in 2016, for the developers and entrepreneurs still building custom shops against Amazon.

TLS, SNI, certificate authorities and HTTP/2, and why a hosting platform should not rush any of them into production.

Content management systems went quiet in the PHP conversation. Are they ready for the cloud, and what would that even require?

Value-based against cost-based pricing for a hosting service, written when Heroku dropped its free tier and changed the entry plan.

A stubborn look at hosting options for developers — shared, VPS, cloud and PaaS — and which of them fits which kind of project.

How hustling with accounting keeps us away from developing our service.

PHP turned twenty. An infographic through the history of the language that still powers most of the pretty home pages on the web.

A subjective insider tour through the PHP cloud hosting scene of 2014: who arrived, who struggled, and what changed since 2012.

fortrabbit announces the world's first Fortran platform as a service, with a new stack and full support. Published 1 April 2014.

Notes from Laracon 2013 in Amsterdam, on the relationship between Symfony and Laravel and where the PHP framework scene was heading.

How a hosting provider turns vague expectations into concrete plans: the Map your App decision helper and the reasoning behind it.

Hosting is still argued over price and performance. The case for judging it by convenience instead, from a PHP platform startup.

A case study of an agency site hit by a sudden traffic peak, what broke, and how the hosting setup was adjusted while it was happening.

Free PHP hosting is one of the most frequent searches leading to fortrabbit. Why the offer does not exist, and what it would really cost.

Code in git, dependencies in Composer, assets in object storage, mail in a service: the case for modular, decoupled hosting.

IaaS, PaaS, bare metal, shared or managed hosting: how to decide, written for clients whose old hosting platform was being retired.

The cloud: economically attractive, but what the about ecological impact?

Brutal price competition produces factory farming in meat and something similar in hosting. An illustrated argument about cheap.

Going generally available without a public beta period: the case for launching a hosting service early and iterating in the open.

A collection of links on the modern side of PHP, gathered when the language was shaking off its spaghetti-code reputation.

Building a PaaS in Berlin without venture capital: what bootstrapping decides about pricing, pace and the product itself.

A manifest for what a PHP platform as a service should do, written in 2012 when none of the existing ones came close to it.

What 160 developers told us about their PHP workflows, hosting and tools, and how the answers shaped the platform we then built.

The www subdomain is optional, hard to say out loud, and still everywhere. On apex domains, print designers and old internet habits.

A first look at browser-based code editors and web IDEs in 2012 — what the category promised, and whether it was any good yet.

Will small hosting plans end up free? Someone always pays for the resources — a look at freemium in hosting after AppFog's pricing.

How locked in is a website to its hosting provider, and does portability across clouds mean anything in practice for a PHP app?

New-school cloud or legacy LAMP style — what's state of the art in PHP hosting?

A 2012 snapshot of the PHP PaaS field — Heroku, PHP Fog, Pagodabox, dotCloud, cloudControl and the European newcomers. Most of them are gone.