I honestly never knew that shared hosting was a thing that companies sold.
I was under the (false) assumption that every user’s website was in their own little VM, not they were sharing a web server.
I was under the (false) assumption that every user’s website was in their own little VM, not they were sharing a web server.
Unfortunately, shared hosting comes with all the risks described: if just one site on the server gets infected, everything else co-hosted on the box feels the effects, especially when the infection is something resource intensive like a cryptominer, or sends out spam emails en masse and gets the physical box on a blacklist. From an infrastructure standpoint we can only do so much; keeping the OS patched and up to date helps to curb the really nasty infections, but the reseller plays whack-a-mole with their customers, detecting infections and shutting domains down as needed.
It's a bit of a mess really. At the same time though, the economies of scale really seem to favor shared hosting from a pure cost perspective, especially for very small businesses that can't otherwise afford a technical team to manage a VPS. So, I think that market is always going to be there.
I’m way out of my area of expertise here. But from a management perspective, when it comes to managing a lot of VPS’s for something like WordPress, is there a simple service where the underlying OS and plug ins stay patched by the provider? I guess something like Elastic Beanstalk but simpler.
Running a full VM, especially on the tools back then, took a ton of resources. Even server class machines only had 4 or 8GB of RAM typically.
By the time I got to the point where I would think about doing something on my own, VPS hosting was so cheap, I wouldn’t have thought about anything besides a VPS like Linode.
https://blog.linode.com/2003/11/04/new-linode-96-plan/
96M RAM
3GB Disk Space
38GB xfer
$29.95
Funny story (but not the ah-ah funny kind): such a service (hosting different customers on the same Windows machine) was still running in my previous company as of 4-5 years ago. They had long moved from physical hosts to VM, but were stuck with the legacy CMS/control panel which was more or less unpatchable (as in, the software editor didn’t exist anymore). About once a week, one of the host VMs would be taken over by hackers using one exploit or another. In that case they would kill the VM, boot a fresh one from a clean image, and start serving the customer data again after making sure it was clean. The service was not sold anymore but they had long-running customer contracts. It wasn’t making enough money to justify rebuilding it with modern software, but it was making enough that simply killing it wasn’t an option.
It wasn’t until I started architecting and developing in cloud environments that the true cost of Windows became apparent - when the cost of every project I do can more or less be directly tied to me.
I still development on Windows but I found an appreciation for deploying to Linux.
There's a thing called Cloudlinux, which is an additional licensed feature that provides resource fencing, but its a lot less capable than advertised ime.
Moreover, many end users rush to chmod 777 their installation because there's a lot of guides out there telling them to do so. There are also highly rated Wordpress plugins that do this silently because developers read those guides.
Also I don't have to update operating systems or do backups, etc.
Unless you website is serverless, good old shared hosting isn't bad. You have less control, but also less responsibility :)