Anything I would previously have used shared hosting for (so static websites) now just gets thrown up on S3, a Cloudfront origin put in front of that, and after that I just stop thinking about it.
Ask HN: Are you still using shared hosting for anything?
41–50 of 54 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are you still using shared hosting for anything?
#42My blog and source downloads are on Dreamhost:
It's been working pretty well. It's apparently held up to being on the front page of HN 4-5 times, which generates a large amount of traffic (more than any subreddit it's been on, which is quite a few). It's probably around 50,000 - 100,000 HTTP requests in that day. Being on HN attracts both humans and bots.
Although that's around 1 per second average, it's pretty concentrated in a few hours. But it's not like they can't handle 5-10 requests per second for a single site. It's all on a single machine, but I'm sure their machines can handle thousands of requests per second. It's probably pretty unlikely that more than a few sites on the box get even 1 request per second.
Occasionally people do run wget over the site, but that hasn't seemed to matter either.
Re: Ask HN: Are you still using shared hosting for anything?
#43I wrote an article about this called Shared Hosting is Bad for Business. I pointed out that shared hosting as a business model depends on the failure of it's customers' websites. You can't run 1,000 high traffic websites on a single server, typically, but you can run 1,000 no-traffic websites on a single server. You see this in practice because basically every shared hosting provider will disable your account if your…
Your presumption of "significant traffic is the only sign of success" is laughable. Many, many real world small businesses have limited capacity bound by real world resources and they can have a booming business by a few thousand hits a day. It is exactly these small businesses that need shared hosting to keep the costs low but still be visible. In other words, if I need a carpenter in a small town, and google townname carpenter, it needs to come up but just how many orders can said carpenter take at the same time?
Re: Ask HN: Are you still using shared hosting for anything?
#44Well, I can tell you that hosting WP sites on a shared host is a big pain in the ... . When a client get's hacked, everyone on the same server (or at least same IP) get's 'tested' for WP vuln. and hacked as well. I found 8 WP accounts hacked in a similar way, on a shared server, one after the other, with the server correctly configured. Smaller (local) shared hosting companies are good because they offer quick suppor…
Can you recommend some good local hosts?
If you're looking in Denver, you can email me (in profile).
Re: Ask HN: Are you still using shared hosting for anything?
#45I wrote an article about this called Shared Hosting is Bad for Business. I pointed out that shared hosting as a business model depends on the failure of it's customers' websites. You can't run 1,000 high traffic websites on a single server, typically, but you can run 1,000 no-traffic websites on a single server. You see this in practice because basically every shared hosting provider will disable your account if your…
I worked for a company that provides shared hosting, and I don't agree with the "relies on failure". Shared hosting isn't for high-traffic websites - it is cheap hosting for low traffic websites, so the whole premise is wrong. Shared hosting providers also sell dedicated, VPS and cloud hosting so they have no interest of having unhappy and potentially customers on cheap plans (a huge chunk of the costs are customer support related).
If you don't get a lot of traffic, then using a shared hosting is perfectly fine, at least where I worked on these servers were very well administered, and we encountered very few glitches and edge cases - shared hosting actually caused much fewer headaches to admins and gNOC than the Virtuozzo containers.
Perhaps there are some bad actors in the industry, but a lot of customers are pretty happy with the cost and stability of shared hosting, so this is why it still exists.
Re: Ask HN: Are you still using shared hosting for anything?
#46I have clients on godaddy who refuse to consider any alternatives so unfortunately I have to deal with shared hosting.
Re: Ask HN: Are you still using shared hosting for anything?
#47I use shared hosting for my personal site and a few low traffic client sites. I use it for my site because it's WordPress and I don't really want a high risk application running alongside some of my other more secure projects. I use it for client sites because they don't get much traffic and it's very cheap meaning I can keep their costs down.
Wordpress is quite secure on its own, just stay away from plugins
Re: Ask HN: Are you still using shared hosting for anything?
#48It's been a year since I moved the last domain off of hostgator. Reason I used it so long is email/mail server. Since moving to a vps some emails don't come. Usually important ones that used domain verification.
Have you configured DKIM and SPF on your VPS's DNS?
I haven't did think it was important unless I was sending emails. I will look into it.
Re: Ask HN: Are you still using shared hosting for anything?
#49It's been a year since I moved the last domain off of hostgator. Reason I used it so long is email/mail server. Since moving to a vps some emails don't come. Usually important ones that used domain verification.
What did you like and not like about Hostgator? I was with Rackspace for years, but Liquid Web bought their cloud site service and I am not too fond of the support I have been getting from Liquid Web and am looking to make a change.
A lot of things to like and not.
Support is terrible and unlimited claims are false because of other rules around inode limits and cpu limits.
They are still one of the better bigger shared providers. Speed isn't bad. Cpanel itself saves lots of time.
Re: Ask HN: Are you still using shared hosting for anything?
#50Anecdotal: Ease of use has always been a major selling point for shared hosting, now more than ever. Not everyone wants to be a sysadmin, and John's Pizza sure as hell doesn't know what a VPS is. They just need a simple WordPress install.
> Ease of use has always been a major selling point You're right, but that doesn't mean people need shared hosting, it means people need managed hosting. Shared hosting is a gimmick model designed to make hosting companies rich based on the concept that 99% of websites will be failures. And it is _nothing more than that_.
I operated in the shared hosting space for years and sold a shared hosting company to a company you know for six figures (not "omg" but I was 19 and it was only two years old) — I'm very, very familiar with shared hosting. I've been in it for more than 10+ years.
> You're right, but that doesn't mean people need shared hosting, it means people need managed hosting.
I'm going to very much disagree with you.
Why does Joe's Pizza need managed? They can follow one of the zillion tutorials on using fantastico/softaculous to install WordPress, find a theme from ThemeForest, learn how to install it, and then add pages. They don't need to pay ungodly managed hosting fees for their low volume.
What defines a successful website? Not IPOing? I would define a successful website as one that has organic traffic (somehow), content, and response times under 250ms.
If you use my definition, 99% of websites are successful.
Sure, shared hosting is a volume game for the most part because the volume game is _easy_. There are providers who are on the higher-end of shared hosting spectrum, charging a premium and providing a premium. All because you don't see their ads every day doesn't mean they don't exist.