Hosting performance / Hosting convenience | Hacker News Reader

Hosting performance / Hosting convenience

blog.fortrabbit.com

18 pointsfranklaemmer9 comments

Everyone's Kepner-Tregoe Decision Analysis weights requirements differently, and convenience is a powerful requirement for many people. Performance is for others.

Say what you will about how awful shared hosting is, but the one-click installer of Wordpress et al has proven that a market exists where people are happy to pay to host things in the most convenient manner possible. Of course, in a more technical community, performance is part of a factor.

In my experience, pride plays heavily into the devaluing of convenience. For every abstraction and or simplification there are people who put it somewhere on a scale from wasteful to cheating.

You don't even have to dig very far into these discussions to find the guys who don't abide hosting at all. They can't fathom why everyone doesn't build their own bespoke hardware and string together their own orchestration.

Of course we do fanthom that.

People who don't build their own server are either lazy or stupid. (not saying being lazy is bad)

The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. – Larry Wall

This post sounds like an excuse for poor performance in favour of convenience.

The better question is, why can't you have both?

The problem with AWS is that it's neither fast nor particularly convenient or user-friendly.

I think AWS convenience depends who you are. You can do great things with AWS, but it is indeed complex and you need to get into it first – maybe not something for the usual web dev guy. That's why there are "middleware" services like ours can be valuable: The power of AWS without the hassle at your fingertips.

One of the reasons we like it is that it IS a LOT easier than rolling our own at our current low-manpower state. It is MORE convenient for us.

We end up with a bunch of infrastructure that for the most part runs, updates itself, scales itself, and is pretty secure/safe by default. That's nice, and worth paying a little more for.

It doesn't need to be fast for us, because we have designed accordingly. It is "fast enough".

So it's hosted on AWS, which you admit rules out performance. It's shared, and has heavy arbitrary limits on resource usage, so that rules out convenience.

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