Using remote files As long as is enabled in &php.ini;, you can use HTTP and FTP URLs with most of the functions that take a filename as a parameter. In addition, URLs can be used with the include, include_once, require and require_once statements ( must be enabled for these). See for more information about the protocols supported by PHP. For example, you can use this to open a file on a remote web server, parse the output for the data you want, and then use that data in a database query, or simply to output it in a style matching the rest of your website. Getting the title of a remote page Unable to open remote file.\n"; exit; } while (!feof ($file)) { $line = fgets ($file, 1024); /* This only works if the title and its tags are on one line */ if (preg_match ("@\(.*)\@i", $line, $out)) { $title = $out[1]; break; } } fclose($file); ?> ]]> You can also write to files on an FTP server (provided that you have connected as a user with the correct access rights). You can only create new files using this method; if you try to overwrite a file that already exists, the fopen call will fail. To connect as a user other than 'anonymous', you need to specify the username (and possibly password) within the URL, such as 'ftp://user:password@ftp.example.com/path/to/file'. (You can use the same sort of syntax to access files via HTTP when they require Basic authentication.) Storing data on a remote server Unable to open remote file for writing.\n"; exit; } /* Write the data here. */ fwrite ($file, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] . "\n"); fclose ($file); ?> ]]> You might get the idea from the example above that you can use this technique to write to a remote log file. Unfortunately that would not work because the fopen call will fail if the remote file already exists. To do distributed logging like that, you should take a look at syslog.