I have decided post our view of the security of our site and hopefully start a conversation with you – the users, in hopes that we reassure you of our service or maybe add/change something that will make you feel safe to use PHPanywhere.

I would like to start off by saying that all security issues are addressed in the ToS, here’s an explanation of how everything actually works.

-When you create a FTP server all the info is stored in a database, but the password is encrypted so even we the database administrators can’t see your password.
A new “Don’t Remember Password” feature will be added soon so that every time you access your server it will ask for the password – in this case it won’t be stored in our database though.

-When you open an html/php file it is temporarily downloaded to our server and then when you save it, it’s uploaded to your server. But once you close the file it is deleted from our server.

So as you can see we really can’t do anything with your files/servers.

But before I end this post I would just like to show you all one analogy; PHPanywhere is to Zend or Dreamweaver what Gmail or Hotmail are to MS Outlook, and all the same security issues apply to them as they do to PHPanywhere.

Let me explain, let’s say you have a Gmail account, all your emails are constantly stored on Google’s servers which means any Google employee can read your private and business emails, pictures and whatever else you have in your Gmail account, which is a horrific though – but true.
But what is also interesting is when you buy webhosting from a company they send your username and password to (yes you guessed it) your email account, and if you’re using Gmail or the like, the same vulnerability issues show up as people have pointed out here.

Sorry guys’ maybe I getting a little carried away, my point is to say Gmail or hotmail are not safe but rather to point out that our service is equally or maybe even more safe than services most of you use on a daily basis. So please comment, email, or post on our forum your thoughts, ideas and suggestion because we really want to hear what you have to say.

One more thing we posted a Poll (Do you trust our service enough to use it?) on this blog so please take a second to take the survey it will really help us out.

Kind Regards,
The PHPanywhere Team