Shared Hosting is Doomed (and I have the graphs to prove it)
clubtroppo.com.au
I've been thinking about the economics of hosting for a little while. Here are my reckonings.
clubtroppo.com.au
It cost me far more administrative overhead than to run a shared hosting arrangement.
Firstly, although the onus is the customer to be administrator, they need plenty of help and hand-holding. Many times they are happy to pay for this help - but now we are looking at a different market completely. (The smart VPS hosters are using forums and wikis to let the customers help each other out.)
Secondly, VPS customers need far more disk space, RAM, and CPU power than shared hosting. The more infrastructure you have to maintain, the higher the complexity and administrative burden. VPS customers usually demand higher availability too.
I've had comments from other hosts almost the opposite of yours :)
I've learnt through experience that people take you more seriously if you have pretty charts. Even nerds who should know better :)
If software needs are increasing at about the same rate as the hardware (and I think they are), then you are wrong.
I'm not so sure. It's not as though Apache has gotten that much bigger. What's changed is the patterns of architecture; people getting lazy and then being stomped by traffic.
But you always have a kernel. You always have a web server. That part is progressively reduced by hardware advances.
But get a faster machine, and people will get lazy. It's hard to code apache like that - much easier to have one process per request, and use one-run cgi scripts. Once that's fast enough, that's what people will code for.
This is just an example, but I still think applications will manage to consume any extra CPU that comes their way.
Example 2: Disk capacity, three years ago you would never have thought of a reason you'd need much storage, and now we have videos.
The faster the desktops get, the bigger (and higher quality) the videos will get. That won't stop till a single 2 minute video will take 250MB. (At that point we'll need bigger monitors.)
Example 3: Memory. One reason to use SQL cursors is so that you don't need to store the entire result set in memory at once. And used to be everyone programmed that way. But not anymore - memory is plentiful enough that queries are typically stored in their entirety in memory, and then walked through. They still use cursors to do that, but give the languages time to mature and you'll find it'll turn into random access arrays.
It's the nature of people - they won't spend time to optimize something unless they need to.
All your arguments assume usage (CPU, disk, bandwidth, memory), holds steady. Now assume they won't, assume they'll go up, and re-run your arguments.
Blogs are about conveying opinions. I don't see the problem with using a graph to convey an opinion graphically.
If you've got data going to any of my arguments I'd love to see it.
It's not any different then supply/demand curves for different types of goods in economics. The graphs represent a concise way of stating assumptions upon which the argument is based.