Ask HN: Why is shared hosting only used with PHP? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is shared hosting only used with PHP?

1 pointKronisLV4 comments

While I personally run most of my software in VPSes, there is definitely something to be said about the ease of use of shared hosting, for when you need predictable and easy to manage environments for simple web apps or webpages.

Because of this, recently I started wondering about why only PHP has succeeded in this area, given that there are plenty of other tech stacks that could work in a similar configuration. Why are there seemingly no (or very few) options for the likes of Ruby, Python, .NET, Java or any other set of technologies?

Is it because they've traditionally been deployed as separte apps? What would prevent someone from offering shared Tomcat instances with some clever load balancing and routing added? Or is it because many of those are comparatively more heavyweight than the CGI-like approach of PHP? Or maybe it has something to do with them needing native dependencies in some cases (which I've seen for Ruby and PHP, thus necessitating certain other packages on the host as well)? Or perhaps it's more a sign of the times and there's not as much reason to attempt to enter the niche which PHP already covers, given the necessary engineering effort for getting somewhat secure shared hosting up and running?

Any thoughts?

Back in the days of PHP 3 it was pretty easy to add PHP to a shared server with things like limits on memory usage and file access. That make it simple for hosts to offer it. They did offer things like Perl as well with mod_perl in Apache, and other languages through mod_cgi, but PHP was the popular one.

These days it's probably simpler to offer virtualized servers than shared hosting for anyone who wants to use something else, so there's no reason to change.

What about the density of the virtualized resources?

KVM or even OpenVZ (or similar) virtualization has a larger amount of overhead in most instances, especially when all that you need is to display a few webpages with very simple interactivity. At the same time, having dedicated (regardless of whether overcomitted or not) resources will probably mean them being used somewhat inefficiently due to idling a lot of time, whereas shared ones could lead to higher density.

What about the need to administer these VPSes?

Furthermore, administering OSes and updates, as well as packages is definitely not in everyone's skillset. Being given an environment that centers just around what you need - running apps, does seem like the more reasonable choice for the more casual deployments, mom & pop shops etc. (though offerings like Squarespace could eat shared hosting's lunch in those cases nowadays).

So you're suggesting that the above are not big enough concerns nowadays and it's still easier to just go the route of VPSes for vendors?

Isn’t shared PHP hosting just another form of PaaS?

I get the impression that companies like Heroku came about because the established shared hosting companies were too slow to adapt when Ruby on Rails exploded in popularity.

Dreamhost does Ruby and Python on their shared hosting.

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