If you’re living in the cloud, you’ll find that a powerful web server like Nginx is perfect for your Laravel application. Nginx focuses on performance and has many advanced features to help improve load times and protect against common network attacks. It also facilitates easy deployments via FastCGI or uwsgi. This article also discuss laravel hosting and cheapest laravel hosting

Laravel is one of the best php frameworks for web development. The Laravel framework is developed by Taylor Otwell and other contributors. It is a web application framework, which is based on Symfony2. It comes up with new features and components that support to build full-featured websites with great user experience.

best web server for laravel

Laravel is an open-source PHP framework used to create web applications based on the model-view-controller paradigm. Hosting requirements include SSH access to the server in order to deploy code from your Github repository.

Other hosting features to look for include easy setup via a one-click install and the latest version of PHP. You’ll also want to configure your server to suit your project needs. For that reason, we recommend VPS, not shared, hosting.

Best Laravel Hosting

Laravel hosting is a mechanism for deploying PHP applications over the internet. Laravel is based on the architecture Model View Controller (MVC) pattern, it allows you to create databases, manage PHP values, integrate Git, and run your web application in the best online environment. Here are our experts’ top choices:

1. A2 Hosting – Best Laravel Hosting for Speed
2. InMotion Hosting – Best Hosting for Basic Websites for Laravel
3. Liquid Web – Best Dedicated Hosting for Laravel
4. Cloudways – Best Cloud Hosting for Laravel

How Did We Pick the Best Laravel Hosts?

We analyzed hundreds of hosting companies, and selected those that are developer-friendly; provide high speed, performance, and scalability; and allow for custom configuration of servers.

Then we factored in expert and consumer ratings from our large database.

Laravel Hosting

What You’ll Learn

By the end of this article, you’ll likely know the answers to the below questions (if you pay attention):

• What is Laravel?
• How can it help me develop PHP applications faster?
• What is the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern?
• What’s the easiest way to provision and manage PHP servers and deploy apps?

Whether you’re a budding PHP developer or a veteran, you’ll learn top hosting processes and options.

What Is a PHP Framework?

A PHP framework is a suite of tools and templates for developing software applications.

It includes a methodology for organizing the code and designing the system architecture.

What is the Model-View-Controller Paradigm?

Laravel is a PHP framework built on the Model–View–Controller (MVC) paradigm. This is an approach toward application structuring that maintains the data, display, and business logic separately.

The Model is the data model. This is the code that defines the types of data objects the system will keep track of, as well as their attributes and relationships to each other.

The code in the model (along with basic utility classes in the core of Laravel) specifies how the application will interact with the database.

Laravel provides a “database abstraction layer,” which is a generic coding interface to a number of different supported database systems. Because of this, the primary data model (the Object Relational Model) is written directly into the application code, not in SQL.

An Interface With Purpose

The Model also provides an interface for updating the data associated with any object. It also syncs those updates to the database or other data persistence layer. This interface is accessed primarily by the Controller.

The View is a system of templates that present data from the model in a specified way, including:

• An HTML page viewable from a web browser
• A public data API
• An RSS feed
• Email templates, and
• Printed documents.

How Does The View Present Data?

The View does not manipulate data, it merely receives it from the Model and displays it as specified. This ensures that if you are (for example) looking at an analysis of site traffic, the data is exactly the same whether you view it as a list, a graph, or a pie chart.

This is an excerpt of PHP for logging into Homestead via SSH. Homestead is Laravel’s pre-packaged Vagrant box that comes loaded with 16 different software packages, including Ubuntu, Nginx, Apache, MariaDB, Redis, Memcached and 4 versions of PHP itself.

The Controller handles all the application logic. This begins with the connection between the Model and the View, as well as the connection to the web server or some other source of requests.

The Controller also handles any special conditional features. For example, if you want an email to be sent when a specific action occurs, that email is triggered by the Controller. (The Controller will no doubt receive information about the contents and recipient of the email from the Model. In turn, the View will provide the template for the actual message.)

Boilerplate Features

When building a new web application in PHP, there are a number of common features that need to be included no matter what the application’s core functionality is.

This “boilerplate” development includes complex activities, such as user and session management. It also includes fundamental utility code, such as connecting with a database.

Very few developers really enjoy coding these types of features. It’s a lot of complicated and exacting work.

This is where PHP frameworks like Laravel come in handy.

Laravel and Basic App Features

Laravel modules provide all the core features that every web application needs, such as a database abstraction layer and user login.

Laravel takes this a step further and offers additional modules for commonly needed functionalities, including event listeners and the Laravel Cashier module for payment processing.

Even better, because Laravel uses Composer for package management, it is easy for developers to create, and for other developers to include generalized feature sets.

This is especially useful for software development teams building multiple apps in a related industry; domain-specific features can easily be modularized and included in multiple projects.

System Architecture

Developers building a new web application have an almost unlimited number of ways of designing the system and organizing their code. This complete freedom is the source of the great potential of software — anything is possible.

But this is also the source of many project failures and delays — anything bad is likewise possible. Rarely will a developer need to build an application for such an incredibly novel function that an entirely new approach is needed; rarer still will such an app be coded in PHP.

So it makes sense that a good web app framework would provide exactly what its name implies: a frame of an application that works for most developers, most of the time.

Laravel is strongly oriented toward best practices and a logically sensible architecture. Proof of this can be found in Artisan, Laravel’s command-line interface. Artisan automatically provides developers with helpful commands while coding

Command-Line Coding

It isn’t just boilerplate features that require the use of a boilerplate code. The development of new functionality can often be equally tedious.

For example, imagine you are building a management application for an auto repair shop. You’ll want to create a class of data objects that keep track of vehicles. But you don’t just have to create a new class. You’ll also need to create the following:

1. A View for Vehicles, as you’ll surely want to display a screen that shows the details of any specific vehicle;
2. An index View to see a list of multiple vehicles at the same time;
3. A route in the Controller for each of these, since their existence will be moot if your user can’t get to them;
4. And finally, a way to confirm that all these different pieces of code all work together properly, so that you don’t misspell “vehicle” in one file or use the singular when you should have used the plural.

How Much Coding Is There To Do?

The Laravel framework provides a command line interface (CLI) that allows you to scaffold up code quickly.

All you do is declare the new model; the framework creates the various files and code blocks that are needed.

Of course, you still have to fill these in with the real code, but all the elements and the connections between them are pre-built.

laravel hosting

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is a service that allows multiple websites to share a physical web server and its resources. It includes sharing a single hosting server by multiple websites causes speed, performance, and security issues.

Laravel Shared Hosting

Shared hosting used for Laravel Applications can cause the following difficulties;

• You are only allowed to use a limited amount of bandwidth & disk space
• Require migration to a dedicated or managed server later
• You might not have access to SSH Terminal
• Slow and compromised application performance

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The Shortcomings of Shared Hosting

While the cost factor is very tempting, shared hosting solutions come with a whole set of serious issues with the potential of souring the deal for almost every user.

Multiple Sites Hosted on a Single Server

One of the major drawbacks of shared hosting is that  many other websites – apart from your own – share the same server. This causes sluggishness and makes your sites vulnerable to security issues.

Bandwidth & Disk Space

Shared hosting givesyou limited bandwidth and disk space on a server, causing scalability and speed issues

Lack of Admin Access

Lack of admin access means your access is limited to perform administrative tasks. For example, if you need to send software different from the hosting provider’s standard, you won’t be allowed to do that. And your need for root might affect your capacity to perform a few tasks.

System crashes

Sharing the host server for numerous websites welcomes crashes and speed issues. When aserver is loaded with more websites, the activity increases, and the process of searching gets slower. Consequently, the system crashes and collapses.

Security

Your website is insecure with a shared hosting server.  Hackers are out there looking for easy prey, and shared hosting makes your sites vulnerable to their attacks To save your website from the evil eyes of hackers, you must opt for a dedicated managed hosting service instead of shared hosting.

You Might Also Like: An Overview of the Best Laravel Security Practices

No SSH Terminal

With a shared hosting service, you don’t get any SSH Terminal. Hence, it’s a big no, as missing SSH Terminal can be disastrous for your website.

Server Performance and Response Time

Unexpected web traffic can affect the server’s limited bandwidth resources on shared hosting, ultimately resulting in a slow response or loading time. Almost every Laravel app deployed on shared hosting experiences the 500 error because of server performance.

You Might Also Like: Ultimate Laravel Performance Optimization Guide

Image Credit: Dribbble

Why Should You Avoid Hosting Laravel on Shared Hosting Servers?

If you use shared hosting, don’t ever think of deploying a Laravel application. The two simply don’t match and fit well with each other. These days, everyone is looking for a cheap hosting service without knowing the cost they will incur in the future. 

Your website’s security and performance are critical for a Laravel application to work smoothly. And shared hosting compromises both of these aspects. This is the reason why I strongly warn you against deploying the Laravel app on shared hosting servers.

SSH or Command Terminal

Most shared hosting service providers don’t offer SSH Terminal features. Also, there is no version control support available,. Hence, being a developer, you have limited options, and you have to only work with FTP.

Most developers remain highly critical of the deployment of the Laravel app via FTP. Moreover, if there is no SSH Terminal available, you won’t have access to the composer, artisan, or any other command-line tools.

Cron Jobs

If you use a shared hosting service, you will find scheduling Cron Jobs extremely difficult. This holds for Laravel-based applications as well, as you will be unable to set task scheduling functionality on shared hosting websites

Application Backup

One of the biggest concerns when using Laravel shared hosting is the lack of an application backup facility. If you lose any data, it’s lost forever. Therefore, shared hosting is not a recommended option for Laravel applications.

Security and Performance

Website security and performance hold extreme importance for developers. By moving everything into your DocumentRoot, you expose your application to hackers, which leaves you vulnerable to malicious attacks. So, you must consider switching to a different web host more suited to host PHP frameworks like Laravel.

You Might Also Like: PHP Migration is Easy With This Guide

Also, with shared hosting, you will experience countless errors, including the 500 error. These errors are caused mainly due to limited resources and server setup issues.

Laravel Shared Hosting Deploy Process

• Many shared hosting providers, including GoDaddy, Hostgator, Namecheap, etc., provide shared hosting services . Deployment of Laravel application on shared hosting is a lengthy process and includes the following steps:
• First, you need to compress your Laravel application folder you will get laravelapp.zip
• Second, open your Laravel Godaddy or Laravel Hostgator hosting cPanel.
• Click on the File manager option and next click to upload button on the top menu.
• Next, unzip the laravelapp folder.
• Open the laravelapp folder and MOVE the CONTENTS of the public folder to your cPanel’s public_html folder. You can as well delete the empty public folder now.
• Navigate to the public_html folder and locate the index.php file. Right-click on it and select Code Edit from the menu.
• This will open up another tab showing the cPanel code editor.
• Change the following line

1. `require __DIR__.’/../bootstrap/autoload.php’;
3. …
5. $app = require_once __DIR__.’/../bootstrap/app.php’;`
7. to
9. `require __DIR__.’/../laravel50/bootstrap/autoload.php’;
11. …
13. $app = require_once __DIR__.’/../laravel50/bootstrap/app.php’;`

• Then you set your .htaccess file configuration according to your website domain and URL settings.
• Finally, you open PHPMYADMIN and create a new database for your application and migrate all tables for the application you like to use.

These are the steps you will have to follow when you deploy the Laravel application on shared hosting. Sometimes, you will taste success, but in most cases, all your efforts will go in vain. The case may be you are unable to find a suitable PHP version to support your Laravel application. Or you will end up with a 500 error.

The Easy (and Not so Costly) Solution

Now, you know why shared hosting is not an ideal option for Laravel-based apps. But, we have got you covered with a perfect solution for all your Laravel hosting needs. And it’s none other than cloud hosting.

Why Should You Use Cloud Hosting for Laravel?

Cloud hosting is the process of outsourcing an organization’s computing and storage resources to a service provider that offers its infrastructure services. Using managed cloud hosting solutions like Cloudways lets you easily deploy Laravel to your server in just a click via Git or SSH terminal, backed up by excellent web security features.

Benefits of Cloud Hosting

The future is cloud, and is the recommended solution for all your Laravel needs. Let’s learn how you can benefit from cloud hosting: 

Reliability

Reliability is among the key cloud hosting  features. Rather than hosting your website on a shared server, it’s better to host on a dedicated virtual cloud server that draws its resource, such as disk space, from an extensive network of underlying physical servers. 

If one server goes offline it will not affect your site’s availability, as the virtual servers will continue to pull resources from the remaining network of servers.

Scalability

Cloud hosting servers offer scalability for your websites, as the resources are available in real-time on-demand and are not limited to an individual server’s physical constraints/capacity. 

Suppose a client website demands an extra resource from its hosting platform due to a spike in visitor traffic or the implementation of new functionality. You’re helpless here with shared hosting, but with cloud, the resource is readily available and the client can access it easily.

Performance & Security

Cloud hosting offers the best solutions for the performance and security of your Laravel apps . 

Unlike shared hosting, there is little chance of running out of server resources (you can always scale up when the graphs start to hit the upper limits), and thus the performance of the application remain unaffected. 

Similarly, cloud hosting comes with better security features like firewalls, IP whitelisting, etc.  

Cloud Hosting Providers

Popular cloud hosting service providers include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google’s GCE hosting, DigitalOcean (DO), Linode, and Vultr. 

AWS offers its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) servers to handle computing services and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Glacier for storage. Google offers its Google Compute Engine (GCE) and Google Cloud Storage for enterprises. Digital Ocean, Linode, and Vultr also provide reliable cloud hosting services.

You Might Also Like: What Should you know About AWS EC2 Hosting Server

All these cloud hosting platforms offer distinctive features and hosting plans. To handle and manage the server load, big organizations often hire system admins – a practice that incurs a lot of cost in terms of human capital. To run organizational operations more efficiently, Most companies are now turning to “managed” cloud hosting services to run their organizational operations efficiently.

Managed Cloud Hosting with Cloudways

If you type the phrase ‘managed cloud hosting’ in Google’s search bar, you see a long list of hosting providers that claim to manage your application and server without any hassle. However, tere is a Catch-22 here.

While looking for a managed cloud hosting platform, you must check the provider’s features. They must be reliable, efficient enough, user-friendly, and affordable. I know that it’s not easy to pick the right option from a list of hosting providers, including GoDaddy, BlueHost, and many others. There are numerous hosting providers like Bluehost alternative and cPanel alternative that you can choose to buy faster hosting from them.

But one cloud hosting service provider enjoys a handsome competitive advantage over all other hosting service providers in terms of user-friendliness, efficiency, server scaling, performance, and pricing. It’s none other than Cloudways!

Simplicity

On Cloudways managed hosting platform you can easily manage AWS, DO, GCE, Linode, and Vultr servers, thanks to a rich set of features that harness security and performance of your website.

Thunder Stack for Optimized Performance

For the smooth and optimized performance of the Laravel application,  Cloudways provides an optimized stack with the advanced caching mechanism. They also offer a dedicated CDN to help you curb down your web page load time issues, thus ensuring speedy access to your website.

Read More: Laravel Websites Hosted on Cloudways Loads Faster – Check Out The Benchmarks

How Cloudways Adds Value to Your Laravel Apps?

• Cloudways provides features to deploy Laravel application on different cloud servers (AWS, DO, LINODE, VULTR). You can install Laravel in just minutes.
• Provides the Laravel 9 and PHP 7.4-ready servers.
• Supports Redis cache. Enabling Redis improves the performance of databases. Combined with Apache, NGINX, and Varnish, this gives you the ultimate and unbeatable web performance.

To get started with Cloudways, you have to select your Laravel application version, for instance, Laravel 9, and submit all application details. 

Then select your cloud hosting server. You can also change your server size according to your clients’ requirements.

In the Application Management tab, you can find many other features like Security, Deployment via Git, Cron job Management, Application Settings, and CloudFlare CDN.

Cloudways also provides Free SSL certificates and lets you install SSL in just one click. You can also create a whitelist of IPs, making it easy to collaborate with networks or regions with unrestricted access to SSH and SFTP.

Cloudways also offers real-time server monitoring service round the clock. You can keep track of over 16 different metrics from the comfort of the console.

In the Manage Services tab, you can easily check all services in real-time, like Apache server, Memcached, New Relic, PHP FPM, Redis, and Varnish, etc.

cheapest laravel hosting

1. Bluehost.com. PHP RATING. ★★★★★ 4.9/5.0. Multiple versions of PHP 5 and PHP 7 available. …
2. A2Hosting.com. PHP RATING. ★★★★★ 4.9/5.0. Choose your PHP version, from 4.4 to 7.4+ …
3. Hostinger.com. PHP RATING. ★★★★★ 4.7/5.0. Support for Laravel, Symfony, and CodeIgniter.