

Ask HN: Why does hosting still suck? - lachlanj


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byoung2
I think there are good hosting options out there, if you choose the right one
for your application. For hosting small, mostly-static sites with very little
traffic, you can't beat hosts with unlimited plans (space, domains, bandwidth)
for $5-10/mo. Of course they aren't truly unlimited, but as long as you aren't
putting too much load on the servers, they don't hassle you.

Where you run into trouble is when one of those sites gets too much traffic,
or you try to run a resource-intensive site like a forum or CMS. This is where
I think the hosting market has a hole. There are plenty of options for high-
traffic, resource-hungry sites/apps if you want to get your hands dirty with
server/network admin. There is no limit to what you could do on AWS or
RackSpace, but for the non sysadmin who just has a high traffic site and wants
ease-of-use, redundancy, caching, and backups, there aren't many options in
between cheap shared hosting and complex cloud or dedicated setups.

There is the VPS route, but depending on the provider, redundancy may be an
issue. There are VPS plans that include cPanel, so the ease of use is there.

I've often wondered why there weren't more managed CMS hosting providers out
there. There is WPEngine for WordPress, and I think they do a great job of
making it plug an play while offering advanced features (static caching, CDN),
but shouldn't there be others like them for Drupal, Joomla, vBulletin, PhpBB?
Or even for generic sites, shouldn't there be a shared host that offers
separate machines for database, web, memcache, and Varnish, with automatic CDN
integration, and hourly snapshots?

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klez
Because you get what you pay for.

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mooism2
What sort of hosting are you talking about?

How does it suck?

