In the age of cutting-edge frameworks, microservices, container orchestration, and serverless functions, it’s easy to assume that PHP is a relic of the past. Developers love to hate on it, and yet-somehow-PHP still powers a significant chunk of the web. WordPress, phpbb, XenForo, MediaWiki, and many more massive platforms continue to thrive in PHP’s ecosystem.
Web Scale !== Enterprise Scale
To understand this, you need to differentiate between two very different software worlds: enterprise application development and web development at scale for the average user. Most of the people declaring PHP “dead” are working in enterprise environments, using Java, C#, Node or Python to build APIs and internal platforms and that’s not same ground that PHP dominates.
Enterprise developers are usually working in large teams with DevOps support, continuous integration pipelines, containerized deployments, observability, and more. In contrast, web developers building small business websites, forums, blogs, or landing pages have to prioritize and optimize for cost and simplicity. They need things to just work, without the overhead of provisioning virtual machines, managing background processes, or learning Docker just to get a contact form running.
This is where PHP shines: the deployment model is dead simple. Write code > Deploy via FTP > You’re live.
- From a server perspective in PHP executes in a stateless, per-request model under FastCGI. In simple terms there’s no per-app persistent process. The server receives a request > spawns new PHP process > output a response > PHP process exits.
- From a developer perspective with PHP there’s no need to restart anything after deployment, no container orchestration.
This makes PHP ridiculously scalable in terms of server utilization and very attractive for web developers.
Economics of Hosting and the “Race to the Bottom”
The reality of web hosting is brutal: it’s a race to the bottom in terms of price. Shared hosting providers need to host thousands or even millions of small, low-traffic websites on a single server. This only works with languages like PHP, where the execution model is stateless.
Compare that to Node. It runs on an entirely different model with persistent processes that stay alive and consume memory, even when there’s no traffic. That works for enterprise-grade services with consistent loads, but it’s a deal breaker for a shared hosting trying to beat the competition on price.
Node execution model is so unsuitable for hosting providers, that when it started gaining popularity, companies tried make it work in a stateless model like PHP / FastCGI. The result? A mix of open-source and proprietary solutions, all unstable, unmaintained, or overly complex. Even Microsoft tried on Azure App Service by shutting down Node containers when idle but that solution came at a price: a start delay of several seconds whenever a new request is made.
None of those solutions really solved the fundamental problem: Node isn’t built for a fast per-request startup. That’s unacceptable for a public-facing blog, store, or any other SEO-sensitive website.
PHP’s Killer Feature Isn’t the Language, It’s the Execution Model
I’m not claiming PHP is a beautifully designed language or that is better than any other. But its execution model is uniquely suited for web development at the scale – not just for billion-dollar companies, but for individual creators, small businesses, and advertising agencies. That’s why platforms like:
- WordPress (~45% of the web)
- XenForo (the majority of modern forums)
- phpbb
- MediaWiki (Wikipedia)
…continue to exist and to grow. These solutions empower people to deploy fast, scale cheaply, and maintain control, all without hiring a DevOps team.
Developers vs. the Real World
Many work in environments where complex pipelines, Kubernetes, and CI/CD are the norm, but step outside that enterprise bubble, and you’ll find that many advertising agencies, freelancers, and hobbyists still rely on FTP and web control panels. They aren’t deploying to AWS with Terraform. They’re uploading files. And that’s not because they’re lazy, it’s because it works, it’s cheap, it’s reliable, and it is aligned with what their customer is looking for.
Practical example: someone who owns a website running on a shared hosting needs a few pages updated. Is it acceptable for a freelancer to re-deploy his 50€/year website in bunch of Docker containers on AWS and increase the cost by 1000x? Of course not. Same goes for new solutions.
Even if newer languages and platforms offer technically better solutions, none match the deployment and low hosting costs of PHP. Until another language replicates that, PHP will keep its dominance over the web.
Conclusion
PHP isn’t just surviving, it’s thriving in “the niche” known as half of the web. It powers the web in a way no other language has managed to replicate. Its continued relevance isn’t about modern syntax, trendy features, or performance benchmarks – it’s about economics, scale for providers and practicality for developers.
So, while people can keep mocking PHP in memes, the language will quietly continue doing what it does best, powering all those websites hosting those memes… and everything else. 🙂
PHP is still around not because it’s a great language, but because it enables scalable, low-cost, low-friction web hosting. Until someone replicates its model and ecosystem for other languages, it’s not going anywhere.