If you don’t manage your own servers I don’t think you can call yourself a professional developer. “My hosting provider doesn’t let me do X” is a lame excuse with cloud servers in the $10/mo range.
I do a lot of work with PHP, both legacy and new code. The number one mistake I see with PHP sites set up by amateurs or cheap hosting services is running Apache+PHP on the same server as MySQL or Postgres. Separate those and performance and stability problems go away. That’s because relational databases consume as much memory as they can get, not because PHP is inherently slow or unstable.
This is the classic "everyone who does not know how to X is not a real Y". Every single software dev can make such a list. Very few reflect on the fact that no two of those lists look the same.
You can't know everything. Programming is about abstraction; so abstracting away devops is a feature (in some contexts), lack of that is a downside (in some contexts).
That sounds about as nonsensical as saying "If you don‘t draw your own icons I don't think you can call yourself a professional developer".
Very few developers actually do both of those things. If you said "If you couldn‘t learn how to run your own servers…" I could possibly see that.
The distinction I was making was between companies, teams, developers who use cheap hosting services and then bash PHP when the problem is they don’t control the hosting environment. “I can’t change my PHP or Apache config because I pay $5/mo to HostGator” is not a good reason to complain about PHP.
> If you don’t manage your own servers I don’t think you can call yourself a professional developer. “My hosting provider doesn’t let me do X” is a lame excuse with cloud servers in the $10/mo range.
Hosting (as a service, and shared hosting) is a very complicated business if you want to do it right.
Also, when picking hosting providers, there are many things that factor into this. Social, political, and economic status are one thing (of the dev and the client). Another thing that comes to mind is the client's (or sometimes even dev's) location/jurisdiction (or the website's audience).
The availability/locality plays a giant role in selection in non-western countries. For example, some European countries/ISPS have super-fast internet within them or up to the closest IX (internet exchange), but horrendous speeds towards anything beyond the IX; sometimes these are intentional (alas, curse politics) sometimes they're not.
We had many clients that would migrate to us because they had these issues with previous providers because we were different from other hosting providers.
Yes, hosting can get complicated. A production web site should run in a production-quality environment, not on some $5/mo shared setup that doesn’t let you control the PHP/Apache/nginx environment. If that’s your setup you will run into issues eventually, just like you would if you couldn’t change the settings on your work computer.
I do a lot of work with PHP, both legacy and new code. The number one mistake I see with PHP sites set up by amateurs or cheap hosting services is running Apache+PHP on the same server as MySQL or Postgres. Separate those and performance and stability problems go away. That’s because relational databases consume as much memory as they can get, not because PHP is inherently slow or unstable.