Node.js vs PHP Hosting: How Each Runtime Actually Gets Served

A PHP request follows a predictable, bounded lifecycle: the web server invokes the PHP interpreter, commonly through PHP-FPM, the script executes against the request, and the process either exits or returns to a pool ready for the next request. Resource use is tied directly to actual traffic — no requests, no CPU spent, which is exactly the pattern shared hosting is built to serve cheaply across many accounts.

A Node.js application doesn't work that way at all — you start it once with something like a process manager, and it keeps running, holding open its own event loop, database connections and in-memory state indefinitely, whether a request is actively being handled or not. That persistent process needs a place to actually live and stay alive, which is the core hosting requirement PHP simply doesn't have.

PHP handles concurrent requests by running multiple PHP-FPM worker processes in parallel, each handling one request at a time — concurrency comes from having enough workers available, which is a resource-allocation problem more than an architectural one, and scales predictably as you add more workers.

Node.js handles concurrency within a single process using its event loop and non-blocking I/O, processing many connections without spawning a worker per request. That's efficient for I/O-heavy workloads like real-time features or API servers with many simultaneous connections, but it also means a single long-running Node process is doing that work, and it needs to keep running without interruption for connections to stay open.