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Comment by sharedhostvet | Hacker News Reader

I can tell you from personal experience that they are in the process of going out of business.

Traditional shared hosts got their lunch eaten starting almost a decade ago with a combination of site builders like Weebly on the user friendly side and AWS on the technical side.

In 2013 most of my social group was friends I made in the shared hosting industry. Now I don't know a single person still working for any MSP as they've all needed to find greener pastures as the companies get bought up by conglomerate vampires that will milk the remaining customers (there aren't many new ones) for what they're worth until the companies finally die.

Looking to shared web hosts for guidance is like looking to 2005 to decide what's cutting edge.

They're done for. Shared hosting is over. RIP cPanel, Plesk, and the whole lot

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And for technical users who find AWS/GCP/Azure and friends too expensive for whatever reason, there's enough small bargain basement VPS providers around that still beat the prices of the shared hosting providers while providing way more flexibility. I run my personal blog using a mom-and-pop KVM VPS provider that costs $2 per month, and I get full control over whatever stack I want to run.

Shared hosting is awful, I don't know why anyone would ever want to go back. Here's an Apache server we set up, it's got every module under the sun enabled along with the associated security holes. You get one PHP version that we upgrade at our leisure, and a shared MySQL server that you pay per database for. Eugh.

> Shared hosting is awful,

Actually, I've come to respect it as an offering because I don't need to patch security vulnerabilities.

I don't need to do backup, etc.

If/when I do eventually migrate to a VPS I'll be responsible for a LOT more.

I'm tempted to move to a PaaS or go serverless, but cost management with serverless is more complicated.

My dreamhost setup has been going fine for almost a decade by now. With minimal maintenance from me.

DigitalOcean at $5 is a very good deal too. And one can keep evolving with DO, implementing private networks or using hosted DB.

> Shared hosting is awful

Depends on your use case.

For my use case, I upload a bunch of HTML files via SFTP, and it just keeps working. I don't have to deal with the server software, someone who can dedicate a lot more time does that for me for a nominal cost (because keeping the server for 10000 people updated is only marginally more difficult than me keeping my own server updated).

I pay the same or less than I'd pay for a small server, and someone who provides the benefit of a managed platform gets some profit for the value (hassle free website) they created. In exchange, I save an hour or two of fiddling with the server per year, which makes this a great deal. You're not paying for infrastructure, you're paying for the "managed" part of a managed service.

Could I just use a storage bucket? Probably. But I'd have to figure out how to make Let's Encrypt work with that, and if someone decides they hate me and downloads my site with a million bots several times per second, I'm getting a bill that costs me more than a lifetime of shared hosting.

If I were to use PHP and MySQL... they'd probably still update it more diligently than I would after a year when I get busy with other things.

Can you use Github Pages?

That's probably worth a try for me. For e.g. some small nonprofit, they probably would be happy to pay $24/year more and have everything hosted at the same provider that handles their domain registration.

Managed services are a godsend for SMBs that, for example, need a WordPress install but don't know how or when to upgrade it.

Not every business needs to hire developers and devops to run their services on AWS.

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