Why do _devs_ still use shared hosting (and then bitch about it)?

"This thing won't let me use external SMTP" - "I can't use more than 2 domains for my site" - "I can't change X in PHP config" ...

You're a dev, VPS prices are pretty much on the same level as shared hosting, and setting those things up isn't exactly rocket science either.

Ive use shared hosting in the past and when I got a VPS it became so much easier. No shitty control panels anymore :D

Small company?

Okay, if you belive VPS can beat in terms of price shared hosting, trust me you are wrong.

I battled a long with my bosses for actual proper servers. Finally got them to host few things, and now my code runs on VPSes. Like 10 or so sites cost company more than one of our "virtual hosting servers" or however you would call it. Only thing that limits us there is storage, which is... wait.. running maths.. 310eur/year (29 eur/mo) and hosting almost 400gb of websites.. Comparing to cheap VPS from hetzner... 36 eur monthly can run us half of that. + you need system admin dedicated to securing all of that stuff etc. Im not doing this shiet. Thats wordpresses ETC. Hell nope. Prefer nope.

If you curious what our hosting plan is, iq.pl highest tier 2 times. Client pays for domain and hosting sth like... 40 eur per year. Yeah. That's one section of this copmpany I dont really want to have much in common with. But you have real, legit anwser here.

TL;DR. so much cheapper.
Peace

I switched to a vps after I started using linux

GOD, THE FREEDOM, THE LIBERATION!

The docker <3

@DubbaThony I have a hard time verifying your claims.

As far as I can see, Hetzner private servers start at 39€ / month for i7-6700, 64 GB RAM, 1 TB nvme. This should easily cover all your websites plus whatever the requirements of your code are. And if my math is correct, you're paying at least 50€ / month to iq.pl right now.

@hitko VPSes were mentioned. Gimme link for 1tb nvme server

@hitko

so probably you mean EX42-NVME on hetzner.

1. 47.50 eur monthly.
2. 500GB ssd x2 (RAID 1 of course) so 500 GB of nvme ssd.

Its not TB.
It's still more expensive for storage, main limiting factor. And it's not raid10. And since we are here, when it dies for some reason there is noone to be liable for it (missconfiguration or whatever, wodrpess virussed site. IP bans for spam email also suddenly our problem. MTA at all suddenly our problem. NS config also our problem, and we need now second servrer for redundant NS.)

It is way more explensive than you think for this use-case, sorry.

Granted, I wouldn't quite trust a dev to be able to set it up properly either.. sysadmin is its own trade for a reason. But yeah shared hosting is terrible and with container technology now becoming sufficiently mature, superseded. I've honestly never seen the point of shared hosting and I hope it'll become a thing of the past soon.

@Condor

Well, shared containers (?) would be a thing than?

Point is these servers can house absolute ton of websites and that enables them to be dirt cheap. And the hosting I provided isn't crappy one, Ive seen worse and cheapper hosting out there. This one is actually pretty solid for shared hosting. Just one thing that annoys the hell is waiting 30 minutes for apache reloading configs ;-;

I think it's interesting matter to explore for hosting providers.

@Condor do you think a dev should set things up when using an admin panel then? If not it really doesnt make a difference in that part.

@DubbaThony dunno, in shared hosting the only thing that could still be an advantage over containers (as far as I'm aware) is that thousands of appliances can all run from the same web server. In a container every container would run its own one, sacrificing a few megs on each. But also a higher level of isolation of course, pretty close to VM's even. One day I hope that something would be developed that could call a shared webserver application but still has the content and memory and things like that separated as if it were in a chroot. I wonder what that'd look like... Perhaps shared hosting still has a future in that. But it's not really needed anymore I think. From VM's to LXC I already saw over 10x scalability improvements. Now even commodity hardware can run hundreds of those, caching mechanisms such as ZFS' ARC included. I dunno.. I'd like containers to become the next big thing for that application. Could solve a fair amount of issues that shared hosting had.

@Codex404

Makes sense and difference.

admin panel:
- will make dev upset
- will make dev pissed off
- will restrict dev's possibilities
BUT
- dosen't require knowlage that for example postmaster should have. Sure, everyone can install postfix. Will you configure mine? no?
- dosent require you f***ing with configuring proper fake shell, dosent require you to create for exmaple PHP chroot instances etc. You tried that? it's madness! Definitely not my skill level to make it fluently on the go every time I want something to just be deployed and going next to some weirdo untrusted open source shiet like wordpress that could do it's best ability to blow up your server every time 0-day comes out.

There is difference.

And yes, I still prefer VPS/dedi server and hours of hardening the config.

@DubbaThony though a dev that knows what to change in the admin panel should be able to google what to do in the VPS to get the same. And most containers are preconfigured almost correctly for common usecases.

@Condor Hmmm... so maybe (im PHP guy so I use PHP as example) you could manage your php-fpm instance (or any other CGI server) and it would be binded to webserver... It seems actually more doable than it sounds.

@DubbaThony yep! In LXC and LXD anyway, every container runs its own application stack, has its own set of users including root, and has a certain amount of resources like CPU cores and memory it can use from the host (not emulated, you're running directly on the host CPU so no overhead). You also get your own NIC that can be configured on host or guest as preferred. Isolation is being achieved by heavily utilizing the kernel's cgroups. Also, the host kernel is applied on the guest, so if you're into compiling custom ones, you can do it on the host once and all the containers will get it applied. Also means that containers effectively never have to be rebooted anymore. Only the host has to be. If live migration becomes a thing in containers, that could solve the uptime / scheduled reboot issue.

@Condor

Great.
Can we have now real sysadmin to make tutorial how to make that happen? Im not that good in containers. (give me docker that you think noone can break and give me 5 minutes)

@Condor

Great.
Can we have now real sysadmin to make tutorial how to make that happen? Im not that good in containers. (give me docker that you think noone can break and give me 5 minutes)

@DubbaThony Comparing prices is done without VAT, that's why 39€ (sorry I didn't notice iq.pl prices include VAT, your shared hosting is actually 252€). And raid 1 can be turned off, so you get full 1 TB. But since you mostly have PHP sites, I assume most of those files are user uploads, because 400 GB of PHP code and CSS / JS assets would be some Facebook-scale software... Putting 350 GB of user content on S3 or something would cost you less than 10€ / month, and considering your current expenses are 2 * 252€ + whatever you pay for your VPS (I believe you said it's more than your iq.pl hosting), you have another 55€ / month left. Hetzner CX51 with DDoS protection and backups is only 36€...

And I believe others already explained the configuration part.

@hitko

ehhh.. you missed one fat bulletpoint.

No, we are b2b company that serves webpages for cheap for small small companies. We use for that shared hosting. on 400 GBs we have like what? 300 sites? and email boxes?

A ton of them in general.

For that low-low price of let it be 250eur/year we have all of the good stuff, including free email backups (and clients love to mess up their emails so thats usefull).

So yeah, it actually indeed IS so much PHP code. mostly individually modified wordpress instances. So WP Multisite is out of question.

Raid 0?
you crazy man?
too much risk. for cache? OK. for production that contains user data no mirroring or parity bits? gotta be crazy, man.

And actually we use hetzner CX for my apps, since shared hosting cant handle it and can't run dependencies like... I dont know, ethereum node.

@DubbaThony it is actually something that's already in my backlog with already partial construction 😁 so far I haven't published it but it's likely to be (one of) the next articles. Do keep an eye out on https://www.nixmagic.com!

@Condor

Uuu shameless plug ;)

I like black theme though ;)

when you will add it, can you ping @DubbaThony? Thx.

@DubbaThony sure! I'll try to remember it 🙂

@Condor Thx

I use shared hosting because I won't pay like 40 EUR per month. That's what I pay PER YEAR.

@DubbaThony Okay, now you're starting to make sense; the only reason shared costing is cheaper for you is because you've thrown security out the window.

You're running 300 websites on the same shared hosting. You have no system-level isolation among those sites so if one of them gets hijacked, attacker can potentially hijack every other site on your server, and probably access everybody's mail as well. How you apply updates to 100s of WordPress sites is beyond me, so I'm pretty sure there are some serious vulnerabilities everywhere. Putting application-level security on all those different sites is a damn pain in the ass as well if you don't have access to iptables or similar, so my guess would be each of those sites reacts to an attack separately, allowing an attacker to perform the same attack on another site after one site locks them out. The list could go on, but just knowing where you work at would probably be enough to bring your whole operations down for quite some time...

@hitko

Umm, not really. On this hosting you can create as much separated instances as you wish, like subaccounts. One hijacked website cannot affect others.

Updates, it depends. We allow clients to pay some funny low sum to add to our weekly list that guy I call personally "cliker" for obvious reasons backups, updates, backups again.

But apparently 100 pln yearly is too much for most clients. Shrug.

@DubbaThony Having multiple FTP / email / dashboard accounts doesn't mean each PHP process runs within an isolated environment. Those environments create quite some overhead, so I highly doubt there's any reasonable way for a shared hosting to offer 100s of those for 30€ / month, let alone fitting them into 2.5 GB of RAM your current hosting plan has.

I'm curious what this "clicker" does when something can't be updated (either because you'd have to pay 50€+ for updates, or because it's no longer maintained / doesn't work with other software)?

@DubbaThony Also a note: 252€ + VAT is only a promotional price for first-year customers, so you probably pay 376€ + VAT for your hosting.

@Nanos

I have private server shhh

Buy a cpanel licence 200$/ year
Set it up on a good server on AWS
You can run an entire company on it.

@Teknas

But its not cost effective at all for medium and small companies.

@hitko

For beeing long time customer we have -33% on all proces there.