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You want your website to be as safe as possible. So you'll typically want Open Basedir and Safe Mode to be on. When you're in a shared hosting environment, you'll find that any server administrator with a good sense of security will also have these restrictions in place. However security pretty much always limits functionality and this case is no different. Because what if you are caged in a restricted environment, and you would still like to use shared libraries like the ones provided by PEAR?

Readable URLs are nice. A well made website will have a logical layout, with intelligent folder and file names, and as few technical details as possible. In the most well designed sites, readers can guess at filenames with a high level of success. Clean URLs are great because they:

I recently had to install a couple of squid servers to act as reverse proxies for a webcluster. You can teach the squid server to stand in between in the end users and the webservers, and to store all the static content ( .jpg .flv .css .htm for example ) in the RAM. This saves a lot of I/O and bandwidth on the webservers, and it can really speed up a site. At the end of the road the webservers' load dropped by 92%. But before all this worked, I had to run through a massive config file and since the squid config file is their manual at the same time, it's about 5000 lines long. So I had to find out a way to filter only the important settings from the config file.

Ever wanted to change the crontab of a server, but got an editor on screen that you're totally unfamiliar with? There are a lot of causes for this annoyance, but one is that somebody recently installed or used midnight commander (mc) which for whatever reason seems to override your session's default editor.

I ran across php value, php flag, php admin value and php admin flag in a couple of .htaccess files, and I've used them sometimes as well by just pasting an example, but I've never really understood why there was such a great diversity. Couldn't php_setting X Y just handle it, and if not, what do the admin, value and flag attributes mean?