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.

Khan Academy has released a new accessibility testing plugin called Tota11y. It's a JavaScript plugin that can go in any web page and help you identify accessibility issues with your website. It will not only help you identify the problems with your site, but offer suggestions on how to correct the problems. Some of the categories that Tota11y will look at include:

Still stuck in the mindset that tons of backlinks and tons of content is the most effective way to skyrocket up Google's rankings? Sure these both have an impact on your rankings, but always make sure to provide a positive user experience for your users.