The LAMP software package stands for Linux Apache MySQL PHP.

Linux

There are many types of operating systems that computers have (such as Windows, Mac OS, Android and Linux). Operating systems govern the languages and capabilities each device has. The OS is in many ways the interpreter between the computer components and the software world enabling other software to sit on top of it.
A good example to the role of an OS is on your phone, when you touch the screen there is a sensor that reads this information and sends it to the OS the os in return then knows you moved your finger on the device. Later, when your playing let’s say Angry Flappy Birds the game doesn’t need to communicate directly with the touch sensor, all it needs to do is listen to the touch event that is triggered by the operating system. You might be wondering now why does it matter? if software had to communicate directly with hardware every software would need to be aware of every single thing in a computer – that would mean that every game developed would need to be developed for one type of computer type at a time. An OS enables to have a mediator between our software and the hardware making it possible for a game like Flappy Angry Birds to work on 100’s of different devices as long as they run with the same OS. That means the same code that is played on a Samsung phone is used on the Sony Xperia.

While originally Linux was developed as a free OS for personal computers, today it can be found in many other systems. For example, Android is built on top of Linux. Most Linux Servers are free and as such became very popular as servers. Among the popular Linux distributions are: CentOS, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu. Because Linux is freely redistributable, anyone may create a distribution for any intended use.

As such before picking a hosting plan validate that the software you plan to work with supports a Linux OS (or LAMP package if needed). For example, WordPress can only run on a Linux OS.

Apache

Web Servers are software bundles that live within an OS that enables computers to communicate with the web.

While Linux is the OS that communicates with the hardware we have in a computer, Apache is a Web Server application – or a software solution that enables sharing content on through the internet. Although Apache (commonly named httpd) is most commonly used on Linux OS it has versions that work on other operating systems as well. As of late 2015, Apache is the most used web server in the world.

MySQL

MySQL is the most popular Open Source SQL database management system. A database is data that is structured (to facilitate access to the data). Databases help store and access vast amounts of information in a corporate network. To add, access, and process data you need a database management system such as MySQL Server. In the case of a blog, your blog posts are going to be stored in a database as they are not part of the logic of the application (such as user information and any content you add into a blog).

 wondering why is data stored separately from the application?  there are three main answers to that. The first, by separating the data from the application itself and it easier to update the application without affecting the data. Secondly, Applications are built to do logical operations but they’re not very efficient at retrieving data. Databases speed up the process of retrieving data because they’re built to storing large amounts of data and manipulating them. Lastly, as your site grows at some point you might want to move your data to the separate Computer is faster or distributed among the continents to speed up your site. But preparing in advance and configuring your site in the way it Helps a girl you’re going to avoid a lot of pain. Most large scale applications already built in to separate between their data to their main application with the usage of databases.

PHP

We mentioned earlier that OSs primary use is to encapsulate all the hardware interactions and simplify hardware to software interactions. Software bundles and adds capabilities such as Apache that enables us to host web sites.

Developers that are programming websites have different needs than developers that are building games. 2D Applications have different needs then 3D applications and so forth. To cut down on development time and to tailor languages to the types of things they intend to do many languages have been developed to facilitate developers needs.

When we surf the web we use a browser that receives text from the web server and images and then displays them to us using a a few language HTML, CSS and JavaScript. These languages are designed for browsers and intended to make it easy for browsers to display websites.
Yet this languages do not facilitate organization and logic tasks that are needed on a server. For example most sites have a header and a footer and other parts that are reusable and as such it is more logical to treat content as content blocks on a server, yet on the client side (the browser) it is best to treat content as pages. That’s one of the key roles of a Server side programming language – it gives developers a lot of flexibility and capability to create pages on the fly and send them to the browser depending on the need. A site with 1000s of pages is not created page by page but through logic blocks that are generated using a server side programming language that intends to facilitate tasks that programmers on a server need.

Just like with all other things related with computers there are a lot of programming languages one of the most common ones used on Linux devices is PHP.

PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML.

Final words

In summary, hosting plans are packages of software that include an operating system, A core programming language, a database to store information and a software that delivers content to users. A lamp server is just an example of one of the types of server configurations that exist to host websites.