There is a lot to hate about PHP, which most programmers will be more than happy to share with you. At length. In a heated voice. Possibly requiring a valium afterwards. The arguments about PHP’s suckiness are interesting and largely quite accurate, while at the same time almost completely academic given its pervasiveness. But that’s a subject for another less stressful day.

In addition to its many faults as a language, PHP is responsible for another injustice on the web: the general unavailability of WebDAV.

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We have only two changes of note here. The first and biggest change is that DreamHost has bumped HostGator out of the top spot. Both are decent hosts, although in my book HostGator’s reliability slightly edges DreamHost’s. In any case, at least for the moment, the king is dead; long live the king!

The other change is EasyCGI hopping up to the #3 slot from #9. I guess there is some life left in Windows hosting. That sounded more cynical than it should be. Sorry. There are some good tools for Windows web development, but I’m a Unix guy from way back and Windows just isn’t my bag. We’ll have to see how EasyCGI does this month.

Happy Hosting!

This post sponsored by PayPerPost.

So, this wasn’t really planned to be the first post in the Siteonomics section of the site, although there is a nice irony to be it being so. Siteonomics is my little word for monetizing your site, which is to say, making some scratch from all your hard work. There are many different things people do to monetize their sites, and I’ll cover plenty of them over the coming months. That said, there is one thing you absolutely must not do. If you do it, you will kill your site and any chance to make any money at all. That thing is selling out.

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I’ve started working on a series of iPhone apps to help web developers when they are on the run. I’ll have to make another post about what else is coming, but the first one is done and is waiting for approval from Apple.

That first app is called CheckSites and performs a simple but important job for you. The app checks to make your sites are running properly. You tell it what pages to check and what text to look for in those pages; if it can get the page and it contains the text, you know your site is okay. If something goes wrong, it gives you details of what happened. This way you can know the difference between a typo on the site and your whole server being dead in the water. Which of course makes the difference between a mental not to fix things when you get home and abandoning your grocery cart full of food to sprint for your computer.

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