Is Laravel good for websites hosted on Infinityfree?
For those who have used Laravel in the past, what problems and challenges do you usually encounter when building PHP applications in Infinityfree?
I need a framework that is lightweight yet includes useful features other than basic HTTP routing. Something that does not cause any bottlenecks to Infinityfree servers (because I want to prevent an early, pre-mature suspension due to high overall resource usage). I want to prioritize security and performance at the expense of the developer’s convenience.
Typically, I’m not fond of PHP frameworks. I usually do not use any PHP framework when building back-end applications, but I realize it becomes a burden when I constantly waste my time and effort on something that has been created and tested thoroughly for ages.
Among popular frameworks, Laravel, Symphony, and Slim caught my attention. But Slim only offers a small set of features out of the box. If only it had a complete set of security features, I would have used it. The only two options left are Laravel and Symphony.
I asked because I don’t have much time to figure out whether Laravel can satisfy my needs or not, all by myself. I’m very open to suggestions and recommendations. You can suggest any other framework than what have been stated above.
Thank you for reading!
Who knows if someone also wonders the same thought as mine, either now or in the near future…
You can make a Laravel site work on InfinityFree, but it’s a hassle. Laravel is not designed to run on shared hosting. Issues you’ll run into with Laravel include:
Not being able to change the document root of your website (but you can hack around that with .htaccess rules).
No ability to run cron jobs.
No ability to run long-running background processes (needed for queue jobs).
No ability to create symlinks (used for the public storage adapter - might be able to hack around this with .htaccess rules too, but needs testing).
No ability to run system commands (Composer, NPM, Artisan).
You can make it work, and there are plenty of website applications that are built on Laravel but can be run on shared hosting without any problems, but if you’re going fully custom, you have to keep in mind the limitations and know that you will not be able to use all the features that Laravel offers.
I don’t have experience with Symfony. My best guess is that it largely suffers from the same limitations.
I don’t know of any frameworks that are really designed to work well on shared hosting.
That said, I’d probably still use Laravel. It’s an excellent framework, it’s very feature rich and generally pleasant to develop with. And because it’s basically the most popular PHP framework out there, there are a ton of third party integrations available for it. Other frameworks might be better for specific purposes on paper, it’s hard to overstate the value of using a framework that’s so broadly supported.