Virtual machines change the economics of hosting for the host. A given VM has a lower administrative overhead per customer than shared hosting does. This will eventually drive out shared hosting, IMO -- except for single-application purposes.
"for the host" is key, really. the customer has to do a lot more work on a VPS than on a shared host, so I think shared hosting isn't going away.
Now, I agree with you that the shared hosting market will continue to move more towards constraining the user to a particular language within that shared hosting environment, as that allows the host to provide better service, but this has been true for a while. For the last 10+ years, if a shared-hosting provider allowed you to run an arbitrary binary, it only allowed you to do so as a second-class citizen, behind several layers of setuid wrappers and other (usually slow) security. Back in the day, if you wanted to run at reasonable speed on a shared host, you'd write in php, and use the supplied MySQL database, which conceptually isn't that different from what many of the language specific cloud providers do today.
The interesting thing is that this means shared hosting, usually with a well-supported but language constrained environment, is actually becoming the premium hosting option. VPSs, formerly the high-end option, are now the cheap stuff. Which makes sense; as a provider, sure, the VPS costs me more ram, but I can get an 8GiB reg. ecc ddr3 ram module for under a hundred bucks now. Ram is cheap. what costs me money is the support, and it is a lot easier to rent out unsupported VPSs than it is to rent out unsupported shared hosting.
If anything, with this new 'premium' image and advances in billing customs, I think we are seen a renascence in 'premium' shared hosting services.
> The interesting thing is that this means shared hosting, usually with a well-supported but language constrained environment, is actually becoming the premium hosting option. VPSs, formerly the high-end option, are now the cheap stuff.
Exactly this. I have been using shared hosting for around $100/yr, which was cheap 3 years ago when private servers were double or triple that. But recently I bought a VPS for $15/year. Sure, I have to do my own admin, but I'm fine with that. If the cost for the shared hosting doesn't come down, I'm going to have to move everything to my VPS.
$15/year? is it an OpenVZ (advanced chroot jail) VPS?
That's an interesting counterpoint to this discussion; advanced chroot jail hosts are still cheaper than Xen hosts, and OpenVZ (the common advanced chroot jail software on linux) is in between shared hosting and full virtualization with regards to how many resources are shared and how much host sysadmin effort is required.
With OpenVZ, all users share a kernel and share swap and pagecache; you can fit more OpenVZ guests on a particular bit of hardware than Xen guests, and generally speaking, more host sysadmin involvement is required when running an OpenVZ vs. a xen or kvm host.
The interesting part of the xen/OpenVZ dichotomy is that it goes the other direction; so far the market price for OpenVZ guests is much lower than the market price for Xen guests; OpenVZ mostly occupies the very low end of the VPS market.
> $15/year? is it an OpenVZ (advanced chroot jail) VPS?
As far as I can tell (from the kernel name), it is OpenVZ. I only discovered that last night, coincidentally.
It is tiny, only 256MB, bursting to 512MB, of RAM. But at that price it is fine for my needs; I even get my own static IP address (the full cost of the VPS is cheaper than just adding a static IP address on my shared site!).
I was reading up on OpenVZ vs Xen or KVM last night, and I take on board your comments above. The virtual server market seems to be transitioning right now, with pricing yet to settle down within a common range like they were a few years ago.
yeah, at $15/year, you are getting quite a steal, OpenVZ or not. for a 256M xen VPS I charge $76.80. Heck. even if your provider is being heavy on the swap (my understanding is that OpenVZ 'RAM' numbers include swap, while under Xen, I give you ram, and you can add swap if you like, so when directly comparing OpenVZ and Xen guests, you should compare a xen guest with less ram to an OpenVZ guest with more.) and you are only getting 128M of actual ram I'm charging you $57.60 for that, and you haven't said, but if they are following industry norms they are giving you more disk than I am, and I primarily compete on price; I'm fairly low-end. Did you get a special? or is that the sort of thing you can order every day?
It was a special, but one that they offer regularly, in the sense that every so often they offer say 1,000 of them until the offer is filled up. Then it is closed off until the next round.
I agree with almost everything you said; I think the major flaw in your thinking was that it turns out that making a virtual appliance that can safely run on the open internet for 5 years without intervention from a SysAdmin is a whole lot more difficult than you'd think. If you could have predicted that, with the other information you had, I think that premium shared hosting (which is what PaaS is) with VPSs eating the low end, would have been the obvious conclusion.
I've thought quite a lot about this, in fact; for a while I was talking about starting a PaaS company that used the customer's equipment. As far as I can tell, the current model (where the PaaS company controls everything) is by far the easiest (thus, if sysadmin/programmer time is your constraint, the best) way to solve the problem.
