Want to know about PHP Workers and how they work? Why are they important for WordPress websites? Which hosting site provides the maximum PHP Workers? Here are the answers to your questions.
What are PHP Workers?
PHP Workers execute or process the PHP code and build or generate the HTML page to serve a visitor who visits your site. It performs all background processes or tasks.
For example. In a bank, one clerk can serve one client at one time and do all backend tasks to get your work done. At the same time, other customers have to wait in a queue or a line.
The next customer will get served when the first customer completes his task with the clerk. Similarly, five clerks in the bank can serve five customers at a time.
If any site has one PHP Worker, then everything will go through a single lane. Multiple PHP Workers can process many processes at once.
PHP Workers executes or clear the PHP processes very fast those are in the queue within milliseconds.
“High Traffic Stores need more PHP Workers”
PHP workers are essentially the concurrent threads that your web server allows you to spin up so that you can have more lanes on the highway. If you have more traffic, you want more lanes or else you get gridlock.
– Chris Lema
How does it work?
When someone visits your site, this request is received by NGINX or Apache (webserver). NGINX decides what to do with that request. If cache (cached page) is available, then this request is served instantly to visitors.
If the cache is not available, then Nginx sends the request to PHP. PHP renders the whole page and sends it back to the webserver. And webserver updates its cache, and the web page is served to the visitor through the browser.
What types of sites need more PHP Workers
A static websites like a personal portfolio, and small business websites generally don’t need a high amount of PHP Workers. Dynamic websites like high-traffic or large eCommerce websites (WooCommerce), busy blogging sites (WordPress website), OR forum sites with many users online, need many PHP Workers.
A complex or busy, or high-load site needs more PHP Workers. They handle all the un-cached requests and help your website load faster. It’s crucial while choosing a web hosting plan whether it fulfills your website’s load requirements or not.
What happens when there are not enough PHP Workers
To get faster performance for your larger or high-traffic WordPress site, it is important to have enough PHP Workers. A low number count means less engagement with visitors, or they become busy, and they start making queues which leads to slow PHP processes.
It results in performance issues or slow site loading. When your site’s PHP Worker limit is over, it leads to incomplete requests or 504 Gateway time-out error, or 502 Bad Gateway error (occurs after a timeout of 60 seconds in the PHP worker’s queue.).
Choose a right hosting plan
Slow or hanging sites present a bad user experience or even negatively impact your site SEO. Google loves fast sites. Your website is an important part of your online business, and it should be hosted in a secure and fast hosting environment.
PHP uses CPU resources to process the code. A faster CPU means faster code execution. An SSD storage server is faster than traditional HHD servers and can help in faster code execution and database queries.
So your server must have an SSD disc and enough CPU cores, resources, and, most important latest PHP version (PHP 7.4 is the most stable and faster than other versions).
Here to help you, we have listed some web hosting sites with their PHP Workers offering in the basic entry-level plans. However, these differ in all plans from entry-level to the highest level of plans.
You may consider these managed WordPress hosting companies for your large and high-traffic WordPress or eCommerce site.
6 Managed Hosting companies compared with their PHP Workers’ numbers
- Nexcess — 10 PHP Workers per site
- InMotion Hosting — 4 PHP Workers per site
- WPX Hosting — 3 PHP Workers per site
- Kinsta — 2 PHP Workers per site
- WpEngine – Unknown
- Flywheel – 3 PHP Workers in all plans
Let’s dive into deep.
Price: $19/mo*
Nexcess is a managed WordPress hosting based on the Cloud that offers a base of 10 PHP Workers per site and is scalable up to 20 for the just entry-level plan Spark costs $19/mo.
To get 20 PHP Workers (scalable to 40) you have to pay $79/mo. for Marker plan. Similarly, for 30 PHP Workers (scalable to 60), you have to go with a Designer plan that costs $109/mo.
As you go with the higher plan, you will get more of the number. The entry-level with the price of $19 a month is the most affordable for this hosting.
Yearly billing gives a discounted price for the first-time purchase. They have owned data centers located in Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America. Apart from all this, there are plenty of reasons to choose Nexcess managed hosting:
Nexcess Features
- 14 Day-free trial
- 30 days money back guarantee
- 15GB storage in the base plan
- 2TB bandwidth
- Easy-to-use dashboard
- 250GB free CDN
- Unlimited email accounts
- 24hr every month for free cloud scaling
- Inbuilt page caching
- Free SSL certificate
- iThemes Pro security
- Object cache plugin
- Free staging environment
- 30-Day backups
- Free premium migrations
- No overage fees, traffic limits, or metered pageviews
- Premium image compression
- And lots more!
Price: $4.99/mo*
Inmotion Hosting offers 4 PHP Workers per site for the entry-level plan WP-1000S. While the WP-2000S plan ($4.99/mo) has 6 in numbers.
If you go with the highest plan WP-4000S ($7.99), you get 12 PHP Workers. The basic introductory pricing for the managed WordPress hosting starts at just $4.99/month when paid for 3 years.
Minimum 1-year billing is required for a new account. Their data centers are in Los Angeles and Washington D.C. Other reasons to choose InMotion’s managed WordPress hosting are:
InMotion Features
- 50GB storage
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Free domain and SSL
- Staging environment
- 90-Day Money-Back Guarantee
- CDN
- cPanel
Price: $20.85/mo*
WPX, a managed WordPress hosting from $20.85 when paid yearly. The monthly price of the basic plan is $24.99/mo. You can host up to 5 sites in the entry-level plan.
3 PHP Workers are offered in all the 3 plans. They are having server locations in the USA, UK, and Australia. Keep in mind, WPX is a shared hosting platform. Here are the other reasons why to choose WPX:
WPX Features
- High-Speed Custom CDN With 26 Global Edge locations
- 30 Day Money-Back
- Daily malware scanning & removal
- Staging area
- Automatic & manual backups
- Free SSL
- Custom dashboard
- And lots more.
Price: $30/mo*
Kinsta is a Google Cloud-based managed WordPress hosting provider and offered 2 PHP Workers per site for the entry-level plan.
The basic pricing starts at $30/mo. For just 4 PHP Workers, you have to pay $100 a month for the Business 1 plan. For 10 PHP Workers with Enterprise 2 plans, you will have to pay $900 a month. That’s too high.
Single-domain hosting is allowed in the entry-level plan. 10GB storage, 50GB CDN storage, and 25000 visits are the highlighted features for the basic plan. Here are other reasons to choose Kinsta:
Kinsta Features
- Global server locations as it is Google cloud-based
- Staging area
- Multisite supported
- Automatic daily backups
- Free SSL
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Price: $30/mo*
This is a well-known brand for managed WordPress hosting based on Cloud. WpEngine refuses to disclose how many PHP Workers they give to each site. Also, there is no information available for this on google or other platforms.
But WpEngine is trusted by many popular brands for their hosting needs. Their basic pricing starts at $30 a month for an entry-level plan. The plan includes single-domain hosting with 10GB storage, and 50GB bandwidth. Other reasons to choose WpEngine are:
WpEngine Features
- one-click staging site
- Advanced security
- SSL certificate
- CDN
- Page performance monitoring
- And lots more.
Flywheel, a managed hosting for WordPress offers 3 PHP Workers in all its plans. No matter what plan you choose from a predefined set.
The entry-level Tiny plan of Flywheel starts at just $15/mo. with 5 GB storage and 20 GB bandwidth. You can host only 1 WordPress site in the Tiny plan.
If predefined hosting plans at Flywheel do not meet your requirements, you can get a custom-built plan for your website. All Flywheel plans come with a default resource allocation of 3 workers unless a custom plan is put in place or tweaks are needed to best serve to site.
Annual billing gives you 2 months of free hosting at the cost of $13/mo. Their data centers are available globally, no matter what your location is. That means you will the fastest hosting for your website that loads immediately to your site visitors. It’s impressive!
Flywheel Features
- 10 StudioPress Themes for free
- Auto-Healing Technology
- Staging Sites
- Fastly CDN
- Nightly backups
- Site Cloning
- Free Migrations
- 24/7 Chat Support and Phone support
- Free Demo Site
Conclusion
We have given you a quick over to choose the fast-managed WordPress hosting. PHP Workers can boost WordPress performance magically, and it can open more lanes for your website visitors.
Nexcess is the only host that offers maximum PHP Workers (base 10 per site) and other enough resources at an affordable price.
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