Has Heroku killed the shared hosting company?
Today I was left wondering - with the rise companies such as Heroku and EC2 offering their platform-of-a-service, what’s going to happen to the traditional hosting companies we all used to know and love - what is the future for the shared hosting account?
Before “the cloud” I worked at an internet solutions company providing hosting services ranging from hosting small websites for local businesses up to multi-server complex online gaming networks. The company grew rapidly but times have changed. We were early adopters in providing linux virtual servers as a middle ground between shared and dedicated servers, but now customers can match exact requirements with price from a number of successful companies such as AWS EC2, Linode, Slicehost and brightbox to name but a few. The market has changed, offerings has changed, the price has changed but the key customer requirements and problems they want solving still remain.
When it comes to shared hosting packages, has Heroku and associated companies killed the market? Shared hosting used to allow customers to use a reliable server for a faction of the cost. However, Heroku has flipped the market by offering a reliable, ready to go service with the great price of free. To make matters worse, in many ways Heroku is a shared hosting provider, just very strong opinions - as mentioned by co-founder Adam Wiggins. With this being the case, what’s left for the market?
The companies I used to consider shared hosting providers have shifted to focusing on VPS and cloud based services, which are the same service that they used to offer but under a different name. Other companies hasn’t changed since I used them five years ago. If managed\shared hosting companies want to survive and grow then they quickly need to think outside of the box otherwise platform-as-a-service companies will control the sector.
There are signs of hope with companies such as Orcsweb. They are building upon the huge amount of experience and most importantly trust by offering services such as PCI DSS to companies who are more than happy to pay. They have recently announced a new service called Cytanium providing low cost Microsoft WebMatrix hosting. They appear to be taking the opinionated approach together with the experience of building a hosting platform.
Traditional shared hosting companies have had competition before and survived, but this is it’s toughest battle yet. Cytanium is an interesting approach to try and combat the competition but it still feels like it’s missing something.
Is this the end of the traditional shared hosting package? Or has it been dead for years with companies just unwilling to let go?
