CMS Web Hosting

The web hosting industry is having a harder time maintaining the security, memory and database needs of the content management solution industry. This becomes apparent when you surf the many open source PHP software projects and see all the threads in their support forums about what does and what does not work when an account holder installs a particular content management system. In this area we will focus on the needs and how some web host handle the job of making a content management system work at optimum performance and still make a profit by not having to throw more hardware at the problems.

The memory hit

As the PHP CMS industry add more and more features to their products the memory hit on the web server being used is going to grow. So a few things are going to happen. Web hosts are going to stop allowing those CMS's that crave high memory use for normal web site owners. I remember when I first started with c++ programming. It was fun at first but then I became aware of memory usage and how critical it was that an application was built efficiently and cleaned up behind itself. Suddenly it was not fun anymore. This is the lesson that many open source PHP projects are going to learn very soon. PHP applications are wild and and eating everything in site. As the industry becomes more accepted and grows the need to be tamed is going to become very important. Wild applications will be banned from web hosts or they will require that they be run on their own server. This would spell disaster for both the the shared web hosting industry and PHP open source as well.

Database support and administration

The open source content management industry is starting to discover the wonderful world of database transactions. The problem is the web cheap hosting industry is not ready to tackle the problem of supporting and adminstrating database servers that give transaction support to those content management systems. This of course means that prices will rise so that they can hire the skilled labor that is needed to accomplish the task.

Security and Viruses

Now that PHP has the lock on popularity and thousands of website owners are using the same software to run their sites the time for more worms and security attacks is on the horizon. The phpBB worm was just the tail of the dragon. The commercial php forums and CMS's are hiding phone home code in their products which dulls consumer awareness that such things can also be malicious in nature.

So that's what we will be looking at and waiting to see which web hosts rise to the occasion. What open source CMS's they pick and which ones they dump.

This article brought to you by the Hiveminds Magazine - Staff. Contact us if you want to post an article or announcement anonymously