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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

The old shared hosting market is still pretty large. But it is stuck with ancient stuff like cpanel and mostly dominated by stagnant players like EIG, GoDaddy, and the like.

Seems like there's room for a move something like what DigitalOcean did in the VPS space.

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I think it's actually being slowly eroded away from different angles. It's niche providers. WordPress being a huge niche, I've been watching it grow from everyone being in the ~$20-30/month range to full on enterprise grade hosting (http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2016/09/14/500month-enterprise-...).

But there's at least a couple dozen providers now who have built WP specific infrastructure at all sorts of price tiers for consumers.

You've also got your SquareSpace/Wix/etc. Shopify. Traditional shared hosting is becoming less necessary in my mind for a lot of use cases because companies are specializing in areas where you would normally say 'just get a shared hosting plan.'

The biggest problem though to completely get rid of the shared hosting space is price. Digital Ocean works because the lack of customer service. Shared hosting needs to have a lot more customer service (or you get EIG). But at the $5/month price point, the economics of it are terrible. The way to get around it is specializing, reducing complexity and issues, which is exactly what I see happening.

Growth is slowing, but that market is still growing.

I would think there's room for some middle ground, like DO, but with more sophisticated self service tools to deploy popular software, install OS patches, and so on. Tools that work for non technical people.

Like a simplified Heroku?

Yes, at a higher level, dumbed down installers with reasonable default settings. Deploying whatever applications are popular at shared hosts, like Wordpress, Drupal, Magento, BBS software, and so forth.

And providing some equivalent to Cpanel for things like OS patches, domain management, SSL certificate management, automated backups, web analytics, file manager, etc. Cpanel's license costs are pretty high...they charge per customer / per month, and so it sets a minimum bar for what you can charge.

If you incorporated additional functionality, you could capture more of the market. What wix.com does, for example.

I'm trying to get into this area...I used to work for EIG and frankly they SUCK. I'm wanting to start an employee co-owned hosting firm that values employee/customer relationships. I think honestly it's not so much the systems/software that matter most for hosting - it's the customer service.

When EIG took over Bluehost the first thing they did was outsourced ALL tickets to India (Hari the CEO's parent's company) - Then he moved chats to India. Then he closed down tickets completely. Chats may eventually be on the chopping block. Then he moved sales to Tempe and promised everyone in Orem that their job wasn't going anywhere. Two months later he announced -- hey sorry I lied, we're all moving to Tempe. You can come w/ us if you move yourself, but here have 1 month pay for severance. I'm pretty sure I just heard that if you work for EIG and don't live in Houston, or Tempe you can count on your Brand closing and moving to one of those two places - they really want to consolidate everything in a bad way.

i envision a company -- where Each employee has a book of business, each employee is also an affiliate and can refer business 24/7 and get commissions for life off anyone they refer. Each employee acts more like an acct rep than actual CSR agent grinding out phone calls left and right. Customer's have a dedicated person they can reach out to with any concerns. There would be very generous ESOP plan, it would be setup a bit like maybe Winco Foods, etc... and other bonuses. Exec pay would be capped at 65x avg salaries. Surpluses left over go into bonus pools and activities for employees, etc..

howdy fellow EIG alum! I worked there from '07 to '09 in their Ops department.

What you're describing sounds awfully like a worker co-op. Why not just do a worker co-op, instead of designing something that would be trivially easy for your board to steal from the employees the moment it gets traction?

Yeah, I've thought about this. I've even run some numbers.

You'd need to combine an ISP and MSP with an add-on like analytics and integrations.

Trouble is, then you're competing with AWS and GCE.

You have what amounts to bare metal through AWS, available by the hour. You can have that today, plus the ability to scale across geographies at the click of a button. Few colos can offer that.

And you are talking about mostly hosting PHP application. For some stacks these stagnant players do not even exist.

The user experience of deploying a Python/Django code to production is so bad in my opinion that I started a shared hosting service focused only on that: https://prodmatic.com

You need to change the hero image, IMO, it looks very templatey.

Just clicking on "Keep me informed" without entering any email succeeds!

I just tried to set something up on DigitalOcean. It's a small website with some PHP (already written), but I'd like the possibility of expanding it with Node later. So I rented a VPS, but setting everything up is such a pain, with all that SSHing and process management and Linux permissions and everything.

Something that allowed me to just throw my site up with the ease of a common shared web host, but also allowed me to do Node with sane permissions etc., would be great.

However, it occurs to me this probably exists, and I just don't know about it.

Maybe that's the untapped opportunity - connecting people with the services that suit them?

> Maybe that's the untapped opportunity - connecting people with the services that suit them?

I think Google has that cornered

Maybe something like heroku with multipack will be just what you need.

Have you tried nearlyfreespeech? http://nearlyfreespeech.net

This is actually great, thankyou!

edit: Nope, they don't let you setup a proxy (for Node) and PHP on the same server :( it's one or the other

Yeah, so I've just spent about four hours trying it, and unfortunately it doesn't seem possible. They don't let you set more than one proxy setting for a site, which makes it impossible.

How about online storage that you will charge me only when I pull data?

I have 20TB of data that I would like to access about 1MB statistically per year (!!) only I don't know which of that 20TB its located. Sure there is AWS and then Glaciar but with my limited knowledge with AWS you need to spin a computer and then set the rules how those files are accessible and it already goes into tens or hundreds of bucks per month. Amazon Glaciar is too expensive to pull data out.

Perhaps I didn't do enough research. If you know company who allows me to cheaply store XX TB in cloud and charge me only per access to it, let me know please.

Do the economics of the task make sense? Is cold storage actually cheaper?

Therein lies the game; the colder your storage, the more redundant copies you need of every block if you want good odds of retrieval. The only way to know a block is still good is to load it and hash it.

> only I don't know which of that 20TB its located

What do you mean by this?

I'm currently running http://bitmash.io, which is a shared hosting service for PHP apps (currently WordPress and Piwik) that handles updates and manages the site for you (but also lets you control it if you'd like). I'd love to hear what sorts of features people want in a shared hosting service.

I use shared hosting too and I got into cPanel like 3 times a year for 2 min each. Sure, it needs to be there but regardless it fills the needs already.

The licensing for the ISPs is atrocious. It's often 1/2 or more of what they are able to charge the customer, total, for the entire hosting package.

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