As you may have noticed, I'm using a custom PHP framework for HortusFox and other projects.

I've started building the Asatru PHP Framework a few years ago solely as a practice project, because using a framework is one thing, but creating your own gives you a more profound understanding of how frameworks generally work. This helps you even when using other well established frameworks such as Laravel. 

The reason I've later actually choosen to use it for production projects, is a very odd thing actually.

A few years ago I've rented the cheapest web server possible. This was merely due to the need to reduce costs as much as possible. But the cheap product also came with a pitfall: There wasn't any possibilities to employ a deployment process. No access to the server with a terminal, no SSH, no whatsoever. How did I upload my projects then? Well, via good ol' FTP... 

Now we get to the point: A Laravel project (I'm using Laravel for quite a few projects) would account for over 8K files with the vendor directory. Uploading that amount of files takes quite a time - especially considering that my Internet back then was also the cheapest possible. Really, really cheap and bad in performance.

Using my own PHP framework, I only had to upload around 2K files including the vendor directory. Yes, I had to upload all these manually with an FTP client, because due to the reasons mentioned above, you couldn't use composer.

Meanwhile I have rented a web server product that allows for a deployment process, fortunately. But still some projects - including HortusFox - are based on Asatru PHP - and probably will remain so.