There is a difference between trusting someone and have a contract with someone. If I use EC2, I'm using AWS, and they have policies and laws they have to comply with (data privacy is one of the first one that pops up in my mind). Technically, nothing stops a AWS engineer to put their hands in my application; Legally, they cannot do it, so they are liable if I find it out.
I'm not saying that AWS is the best. I'm saying that compared to AWS, Codius gives me less guarantees.
> [...] That's not possible with traditional hosting because the uploader generally gets admin rights at ALL hosts they upload to.
A Sybil attack seems to be quite cheap on Codius. I can have 10 hosts managed with 10 different identities and make people think the app is legit.
> Standardization, so you can upload to many hosts without speaking a dozen different APIs.
I don't mind having more tools to achieve that, but Docker/Kubernetes standardized the way devops deploy apps, you can use them on different cloud providers (or on your own machine[s]).
> You pay when you upload and your client is enforcing a certain max rate. The host could turn off your contract before the agreed-upon time so if you're worried about that you could only pay for e.g. two hours at a time using some cron job.
There is still no proof that the host charged me the correct amount of money. Even if I cap the money I put in the system, a host can still charge me much more than it should be.
> In practice, a lot of this will come down to host selection. If a host has been legit, reliable, etc. for years, it's unlikely to suddenly decide to screw you out of $10. That's why we think host trackers like codiushosts.com will play an important role. We're working on building our own host tracker as well.
Maybe I'm thinking too much about "blockchain" when I think about Codius, but reading "Decentralized apps" and "Smart contracts/programs" in the homepage doesn't help, I'd remove it.