If you are a Magento user, you're probably well aware of the fact there is a beta version of Magento 2 currently available. Since this is a beta version, you won't want to upgrade your production site quite yet. However since this beta version will eventually lead to a stable version, now is as good of a time as any to start planning your upgrade.

If you are not a developer, you probably aren't familiar with HHVM and PHPNG. If you're hosting your site with Hosting.com though, it's more than likely your site is powered by PHP. The beta version of PHP 7 was just released on Friday so it doesn't hurt to learn how this new version of PHP can dramatically increase the performance of your site.

As you may have read on our June 29th blog post, the alpha version of PHP 7 was released. Since that post was published, PHP released the first beta version of PHP. We know that PHP 7 has a clear cut focus on performance. Let's look at some of the contributing elements to those performance improvements and the other enhancements included with PHP 7.

In previous blog posts, including our comparison of HHVM vs PHPNG, we talk about how PHP 7 typically beats HHVM by up to 20% and it is up to 100% faster than PHP 5.6 (even though we do need to run our own performance comparisons here at Hosting.com).

Do you ever look at your referral traffic in Analytics and notice sites that aren't even linking to you sending hundreds and maybe thousands of visits? At first glance you may be tempted to pat yourself on your back because these referrals gives your traffic stats a boost. At second glance however you realize these aren't real referrals; they're spam referrals.

With the recent Alpha release of PHP 7, Hosting.com is proud to be one of the first providers to offer PHP 7 Hosting. PHP 7 is available on Hosting.com's Turbo Web Hosting service. Our PHP Switcher makes it easy to move between multiple PHP versions including PHP 5.1-5.6, and of course PHP 7.