Deploying PHP Projects on Shared Hosting (cPanel & Hostinger)

Not every client project justifies a VPS or cloud server — for a lot of small business sites, shared hosting through cPanel-style panels (like Hostinger's hPanel) is a perfectly reasonable, cost-effective choice, as long as you know the specific quirks involved.

The biggest one: most modern PHP frameworks (Laravel especially) expect their public entry point inside a `public/` folder, while shared hosting typically serves whatever sits directly in `public_html`. The clean solution is keeping the framework's core code outside the publicly served folder entirely, and only exposing the contents of `public/` as the document root — keeping sensitive files like `.env` completely inaccessible from the browser.

Environment configuration is another common trip-up — forgetting to switch `APP_ENV` to `production` and `APP_DEBUG` to `false` before going live can expose detailed error traces (and sometimes credentials) to any visitor who triggers an error.

SSH access (when available, like on Hostinger's Business plans) is what makes this whole process manageable — running Composer, migrations, and cache-clearing commands directly, rather than trying to do everything through a file manager.

None of this is complicated once you've done it a couple of times, but each of these small details is exactly the kind of thing that turns "the site works locally" into "the site actually works in production."