Benefits of cloud infrastructure?

Reclaim Cloud
#1

This may be a can of worms type of thread, but so be it.

I see the immediate benefit of cloud environments for developers…having flexible tech stacks with scaling options make a lot of sense when you’re running DoOO for a university or if you’re running production applications. They also make sense for hobbyists like myself when I want to spin up a Python app (or something outside the standard LAMP stack) for fun. It’s doable in cPanel, but not a ton of fun…

But beyond that, is there a main benefit for most shared hosting customers? It’s been fun to play around and see how things work, but for general low-impact, low traffic sites, I don’t see a ton of benefit for jumping over to Cloud from shared hosting, especially because a cloud system will likely cost more per year than shared.

Other thoughts?

#3

I actually think this is quite true (and I appreciate the can of worms as it’s always useful). Shared Hosting is very economical for particular use cases and for folks who are just looking to run WordPress or an HTML page easily it will still rule the roost. I think the target customer for Cloud will be someone who needs all the things you mention earlier: more flexibility, root access, different technologies like MongoDB, or simply need a higher level of performance for a public site that will have a wider audience. I could certainly see plenty of folks that don’t need any of that and won’t find Cloud all that useful. I could also see people who may find reasons to use both for different projects.

In other words Cloud is by no intention meant to replace Shared Hosting. But we do think a lot of software and projects are moving towards technical environments that will make economical shared hosting less and less prevalent long term as developers shy away from PHP and container-based deployment options become more and more the norm.

Would love to hear from others though on their thoughts. It’s certainly early days and that’s the whole reason we wanted to get this in front of a lot of people and understand where it is and isn’t useful.

2 Likes
#4

Yeah, it was a question I got on my blog when introducing Reclaim Cloud as well, and for me it is not about supplanting shared hosting, as @timmmmyboy notes, given that will always be cheapest and easiest for most PHP apps, rather its about being able to help support a whole new generation of applications that whole new generation of applications that can’t run in the LAMP stack. It will be a slow burn, but the fact remains that most recent applications and environments won’t run in cPanel, which means we are not able to either provide or support them in any capacity, it’s as much a leap forward for our own learning as it is an ongoing shift/evolution in the hosting landscape that Tim tracks for almost a decade now in this post.

#5

From what I’ve seen so far, Tim’s comment of “I could also see people who may find reasons to use both for different projects.” fits very well with how I could see using Reclaim Hosting/Cloud in the future🙂

On a related note, are there any cost estimates for something like a RocketChat instance with fairly low usage (i.e. ~ 100 students a term a year)?