

Shared Hosting is Doomed (and I have the graphs to prove it) - jacques_chester
http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/07/10/shared-hosting-is-doomed-and-i-have-the-graphs-to-prove-it/
I've been thinking about the economics of hosting for a little while. Here are my reckonings.
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Andys
As someone running a VPS host company, I disagree with the article.

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.

~~~
jacques_chester
My point is not about the current market. It's about how trends in hardware
and wages mean VPSes could eventually come on top.

I've had comments from other hosts almost the opposite of yours :)

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jraines
"About the charts: All charts in this post are illustrative, not data-driven."

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jacques_chester
I'd be happy to see data if anyone has any. But the whole piece is built on
ratios and trends more than any particular datum.

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davidw
What'd you make them with, out of curiosity?

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jacques_chester
OmniGraffle for the line charts and Numbers for the pie charts.

I've learnt through experience that people take you more seriously if you have
pretty charts. Even nerds who should know better :)

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davidw
Ah...Mac. Damn, I've been looking for something on Linux to make graphs like
that... simple "economics style" (no actual data;-) ones with basic curves and
labels.

~~~
jacques_chester
Yeah, wish I could help. But Mac == pretty graphics _is_ a cliche for a
reason.

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ars
One thing you are forgetting is that software is also getting more
complicated. Meaning you need a faster machine to run it.

If software needs are increasing at about the same rate as the hardware (and I
think they are), then you are wrong.

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jacques_chester
What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away?

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.

~~~
ars
Apache can get bigger though. Right now it runs in threads, and in-process php
parser (for example). Why? Because it's too slow otherwise.

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.

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jacques_chester
Good point and well put. I'll give it some more thought, but my initial hunch
is that the ratios of overhead will still converge, if for no other reason
that software which doesn't expand as quickly (the kernel) gets factored out
by the hardware-driven convergence on zero.

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jonknee
... Graphs you pulled out of your ass.

~~~
lbrandy
There is no requirement in the Graphing Bylaws that states graphs must come
from real data. They are just another way of graphically displaying what he
believes to be true. Feel free to argue with his beliefs.

Blogs are about conveying opinions. I don't see the problem with using a graph
to convey an opinion graphically.

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jonknee
When someone claims they have the graphs to prove something, it is implied
that they are backed up by something other than conjecture.

~~~
lbrandy
I'm sorry but that's nonsense. People draw graphs all the times to prove
things w/o using data. Especially when trends are what is important to convey
in a graphical sense.

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.

