PHP is a server-side scripting language designed for web development but also used as a general-purpose programming language. As of January 2013, PHP was installed on more than 240 million websites (39% of those sampled) and 2.1 million web servers. [4] Originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, [5] the reference implementation of PHP (powered by the Zend Engine) is now produced by The PHP Group. [6] While PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page , [5] it now stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor , which is a recursive acronym. [7]