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Where is the hosting industry going?
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Where is the hosting industry going?

I’ve been noticing that the prices providers are able to charge are getting lower and lower.
Hardware costs are coming down.

Here we have a 100 TB SSD at 40,000 USD.
In a few years that will be likely available much much cheaper and the new Cutting Edge may be a 1PB SSD at the same 40k or so.

We are seeing servers with 6TB+ of Ram and if trends continue, also only a matter of time before we have 10, 50 and 100 TB ram configurations common with the new state of the art of RAM in the 1PB range.

CPUs are going into many many cores with Threadripper forcing Intel to increase core counts and drop prices. In the future we might see 100 and later 1000 core offerings. Might Apple even enter the CPU market with a M1 server equivalent?

The amount of storage a basic WordPress site need hasn't changed from a few GB (if even so much), and the big sites are moving into the cloud anyway.

Shared hosting has been stuck at around 3-5$ a month or less for about a decade now while hardware prices are coming down.

Basically I see a situation where you can’t charge more and hardware is getting cheap enough to be sufficient for many needs that you may have once needed a dedicated setup for.

In 10years we might see something like this:
BlackFriday
1TB SSD NVM3,
10 GB Ram,
1PB Bandwidth 50GBps Port,
10 CPU Cores,
1 IPV4,
IPV6 /48,
20$ a year?

If the hardware is dirt cheap what software or other services may it be valuable to invest in now so that in 10 years web hosting providers are still a thing? Should all the small providers roll out their own cloud? If so is there an OpenSource project that would allow smaller providers to roll out something similar to AWS ( on a smaller scale of course )? Is GPU hosting or Machine Learning the way to go?

Or am I looking at this the wrong way and there is nothing to worry about?

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Comments

  • BradyHBradyH Member, Host Rep

    You never know. Or the pricing starts going the other way. As more and more host get bought out.

    Thanked by 1jixun
  • orion504orion504 Member
    edited December 2020

    I think it will be more or less related to hardware specs, but to software features, like autoscaling. Like I want to have a managed k8s cluster to host a website, only need to pay $12/year, but in case of surging on visitor, provider will autoscale the cluster, charge $1-2 for extra hosts. I only need to manage the application, not the infrastructure.

  • More and more hosts get bought out. The price increases, then clients start to look for alternatives.

    For example every provider here is likely cheaper than AWS. Because they probably cant offer what AWS does. If their privces start to get close to what a cloud provider would charge, then what would be to point of not going with the Cloud provider?

    I know the future is uncertain that's why I'm curious what people are thinking.

  • edited December 2020

    10 Years ago:

    https://lowendbox.com/blog/blazevps-10year-128mb-openvz-vps/
    https://lowendbox.com/blog/yardvps-15year-128mb-openvz-vps/

    128MB-256MB RAM, 25GB HDD OpenVZ VPS on Xeon E5506 for $10/year. Now we have providers with VirMach offering 1GB RAM, 25GB SSD on newer CPUs for roughly the same price (that's generally available and not through sales).

    I don't think we'll see anything as big as the plan you mention in 2030, but maybe 20-30 GB on the next storage interface that pushes 40+Gbps, 4-6 vCores and 4-6 GB RAM for $10/year (regular pricing). I wonder if IPv4 will represent more of the pricing.

    I don't think hosting providers are too interested in those large SSDs for general use just because of the IO limitations.

    Thanked by 1RedSox
  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran
    edited December 2020

    Seems like only yesterday you could fit 10k customers on a 2gb memory box because it was all static HTML. Then along came Wordpress and the overhead per customer skyrocketed. Expect that hardware and software may not scale in sync, but that software will never let you run a million dollar hosting company at low prices with one physical server.

  • trycatchthistrycatchthis Member
    edited December 2020

    From what I have observed 90% Wordpress content could be served as static HTML and only needs to be regenerated once there is an update. The posting portion of a site could be AJAX or what ever fancy term they are calling it these days. Even many of the plugins that can be simply loaded from an embedded element like a script. Trillions of wasted cpu cycles and other resources.

    Maybe there is room for an optimised CMS that uses less resources than WordPress, the trade off might be higher development costs.

  • lentrolentro Member, Host Rep

    @trycatchthis said: Maybe there is room for an optimised CMS that uses less resources than WordPress

    Jamstack, my friend. Hugo + Netlify is a great friend.

    Regarding your other thoughts, prices will decline, especially in the AI/ML market because those don't have many low end providers yet.

    Thanked by 1yoursunny
  • Any plugin for WordPress that will just output raw HTML to a viewable portion of the website?

    Like - create an subdomain - wordpress.example.tld - with WordPress installed and this voodoo plugin. That voodoo plugin outputs raw HTML to /home/example/public_html whenever you save or "rebuild" the WordPress site at wordpress.example.tld.

    This way - WordPress administrators and site designers would log into wordpress.example.tld - but visitors would be oblivious to this subdomain and just visit example.tld.

    That would seem to give the best of both worlds. People would be able to still use WordPress for designing a site - but traffic to that site wouldn't generate extra PHP and SQL loads.

  • lentrolentro Member, Host Rep

    @sparek Perhaps a caching plugin? I've used those in the past, and I think they do similar to what you are describing.

  • I don't know if caching plugins are as transparent as what I'm proposing.

    But I'll be the first to admit, I'm not a WordPress warrior or all that knowledgeable about all of the plugins available for WordPress.

    Just seems to me that caching plugins tend to operate on a ... "are visitors seeing a cached copy of the website? Or is this being called directly from the database?" But maybe I'm wrong.

    I just think it'd be easier - at least in terms of knowing what is happening - if the plugin just simply outputted HTML files, that you could actually see and read in your public_html folder.

    Thanked by 1lentro
  • @sparek said:
    I don't know if caching plugins are as transparent as what I'm proposing.

    But I'll be the first to admit, I'm not a WordPress warrior or all that knowledgeable about all of the plugins available for WordPress.

    Just seems to me that caching plugins tend to operate on a ... "are visitors seeing a cached copy of the website? Or is this being called directly from the database?" But maybe I'm wrong.

    I just think it'd be easier - at least in terms of knowing what is happening - if the plugin just simply outputted HTML files, that you could actually see and read in your public_html folder.

    I think some page builders did this in the past. They might even exist. But when hardware began to get cheap people didn't see the point of it. Similarly with PHP, from what I remember close to the beginning sites were compiled and not scripted.

    But lets say that WordPress did begin to do this? Would we then start seeing a market for 1$ per year hosting? As in its still a race to the bottom.

    Where is the race to the top in terms of pricing?

    And before I forget Is there an OpenSource version of AWS/Azure/IBM/Google Cloud where a syd admin could setup their own cloud once they had the resources.

  • yoursunnyyoursunny Member, IPv6 Advocate
    edited December 2020

    @jar said:
    Seems like only yesterday you could fit 10k customers on a 2gb memory box because it was all static HTML. Then along came Wordpress and the overhead per customer skyrocketed. Expect that hardware and software may not scale in sync, but that software will never let you run a million dollar hosting company at low prices with one physical server.

    I tried WordPress in 2007 but decided it's too inefficient. Then I wrote everything in HTML, but it became boring when my website grew from 20 pages to 100 pages.

    After 2017 rebuild, I have about 300 pages now.
    250 pages are in 2 static site generators (Jekyll and Hexo).
    The remaining 50 pages are written in a mix of Markdown and HTML and PHP, and rendered using server side PHP script inside Twig templates. They are mostly static although not generated into HTML, and nginx would cache them for a few minutes in /run/shm.

    @lentro said:

    @trycatchthis said: Maybe there is room for an optimised CMS that uses less resources than WordPress

    Jamstack, my friend. Hugo + Netlify is a great friend.

    I have several sites in Netlify, including the push-ups. However, none is created from Hugo. I mostly use Webpack, Preact, RE:DOM, or Doxygen.

    CMS is not necessary. Just write Markdown and YAML in Visual Studio Code and push to GitHub. Automation does the rest.

    Thanked by 2jar lentro
  • Rather I see VPS/Shared/Cloud hosts offering dedicated RAM and CPUs to everyone (in 2020 prices) in next 10 years if RAM and CPU scale to such extent.

    Moreover with overall machine, storage and fiber optic prices getting cheaper and also bandwidth getting wider (from TB to PB and beyond) PLUS fiber optic penetration gets deeper to the last mile in a village; so people might start hosting sites/apps from their own location with one-time investment thereby creating local-tiny-datacenters (like me and my 4 friends living on Street #1 have a DC, while 3 of my friends living on Street #2 have their own DC2 in a garage/room, etc. and with huge storage capacity we peer among other tiny-DCs in our area/town/city/state to create cluster-CDN and thereby eliminating today's centralized CDNs)

    Kinda hosting will be more sort of local/decentralized than what is today. Cloudflare has already started experimenting it with CF Workers - the javascript that complies and host static files in each of their 200 PoP around the world thereby eliminating the need to static file hosting companies. I'm also using it for broucher-type mini sites eliminating need to pay for cPanel, cloudlinux, litespeed for their licenses.

    Regarding Wordpress, in future we might see WP may get bundled with its own cPanel (so no cpanel/directadmin requirement) and cloudlinux like functions/features - And why not? Over 40% of world's sites run on WP in 2020, so they are really waisting money on third-party control panels, web servers, cloudlinux, jetbackups and what not! WP should (and will) certainly try to develop "WP as standalone" (server-cum-CP-cum-CMS) and soon we might not need others at all.

    Also there could be online-only version of cpanel (like runcloud) and we will not need to download it and install on each server.

    there are many things thats gonna change in next 10 years. We might not even see today's flourishing brands as their business models might be outdated!

    the future is calling.

  • There is one major benefit to using Wordpress. SEO, out of the box it seems to be great for SEO and you can further optimize later.

    I havent seen any other monetization plans outside of a few plugins they develop like JetPack and then there's their hosting platform Wordpress.com. I could be wrong though.

    ISPs have for the longest time discouraged people from hosting websites locally, I have no idea if that will change.

  • MrRadicMrRadic Patron Provider, Veteran

    I'm seeing prices trending up with all the purchases. Literally just Hetzner and a few others offering ultra low prices. OVH is getting out of that game slowly, others will follow. There will always be companies to fill that gap, but it's only natural for trends to change.

  • by 2030, you'll still be single.

  • NetDynamics24NetDynamics24 Member, Host Rep

    @MrRadic said:
    Literally just Hetzner and a few others offering ultra low prices.

    Just to note that Hetzner has raised some of their prices recently. Their auction servers were starting from 19 euros, while now they start from 25 euros.

  • I see more and more people getting gigabit broadband speeds in their homes will be bad for hosting industry. I know when I can get 300Mbps+ upload speeds instead of my current 22Mbps upload, there isn't much point in having any paid VPS, really, I have way more (idle) gear at my place than I pay for in the cloud. And it just becomes easier and easier for people to put up their own blogs and sites that they don't need to pay hosting companies.

    There always needs to be killer apps to demand big bandwidth and big storage that make home hosting difficult. 4K is pretty decent, I don't see 8K becoming the killer app to the home (but sure will be for content producers on the BIG player data centers).

    So data centers have a bright future. Web hosting only companies, only increased competition, IMO.

  • ewwinkewwink Member
    edited December 2020

    hdd -> ssd -> nvme
    plain -> framework -> docker
    one liner JS -> npm, hundreds of javascript file to run one liner JS -> run npm on docker

    people always need more resources

  • I too see a move towards decentralized/local. IoT and the still very young esports industry will be a major catalyst. The push towards digitalization and the tech future will push for the upgrading of more regional and local infrastructure. This will lower prices as you wont be beholden to industry dinosaurs renting out 12 year old servers at a premium in you local DC. This will also allow for more variety of locations at an actual affordable price in regards to vps.

  • @petunias said:
    12 year old servers at a premium in you local DC. This will also allow for more variety of locations at an actual affordable price in regards to vps.

    Who is still renting 12 year old servers at a premium? I understand its an exaggeration but that isnt what I see at all.

    Also we are getting a VPS for $36 a year sometimes as little as $5 a year.

  • @trycatchthis said: Also we are getting a VPS for $36 a year sometimes as little as $5 a year.

    Those $5 per year VPS's is rather marketing stunt to increase customer base. IP address it-self cost more than this.

    As world getting lazier and lazier I expect managed services will be in demand once again.

  • YmpkerYmpker Member
    edited December 2020

    @sparek said:
    Any plugin for WordPress that will just output raw HTML to a viewable portion of the website?

    Like - create an subdomain - wordpress.example.tld - with WordPress installed and this voodoo plugin. That voodoo plugin outputs raw HTML to /home/example/public_html whenever you save or "rebuild" the WordPress site at wordpress.example.tld.

    This way - WordPress administrators and site designers would log into wordpress.example.tld - but visitors would be oblivious to this subdomain and just visit example.tld.

    That would seem to give the best of both worlds. People would be able to still use WordPress for designing a site - but traffic to that site wouldn't generate extra PHP and SQL loads.

    WP2Static is the plugin you want, I think :)

    Admin can edit like logged in but the site served to customers is fully static files.

    https://github.com/leonstafford/wp2static

  • M66BM66B Veteran
    edited December 2020

    @trycatchthis said:
    More and more hosts get bought out. The price increases, then clients start to look for alternatives.

    For example every provider here is likely cheaper than AWS. Because they probably cant offer what AWS does. If their privces start to get close to what a cloud provider would charge, then what would be to point of not going with the Cloud provider?

    I know the future is uncertain that's why I'm curious what people are thinking.

    For me AWS has appeared to be 25 times cheaper compared to lowend servers, plus it is a fully manage service. The main reason to migrate was to free myself from managing servers, which I did for over a decade, and I was even willing to pay more for this, but surprisingly the opposite is true. Interesting, isn't it?

  • M66BM66B Veteran
    edited December 2020

    Duplicate

  • trycatchthistrycatchthis Member
    edited December 2020

    @M66B said:

    @trycatchthis said:
    More and more hosts get bought out. The price increases, then clients start to look for alternatives.

    For example every provider here is likely cheaper than AWS. Because they probably cant offer what AWS does. If their privces start to get close to what a cloud provider would charge, then what would be to point of not going with the Cloud provider?

    I know the future is uncertain that's why I'm curious what people are thinking.

    For me AWS has appeared to be 25 times cheaper compared to lowend servers, plus it is a fully manage service. The main reason to migrate was to free myself from managing servers, which I did for over a decade, and I was even willing to pay more for this, but surprisingly the opposite is true. Interesting, isn't it?

    How long have you been using AWS? What kind of saving are you getting percentage wise compared to running the servers yourself?
    VPS offer predictable pricing but generally you may pay for capacity that you aren't always using. If you have a scalable setup then you can potentially save by paying for only what you use.

    Edit: savings noted in orignal post

  • @M66B said:

    @trycatchthis said:
    More and more hosts get bought out. The price increases, then clients start to look for alternatives.

    For example every provider here is likely cheaper than AWS. Because they probably cant offer what AWS does. If their privces start to get close to what a cloud provider would charge, then what would be to point of not going with the Cloud provider?

    I know the future is uncertain that's why I'm curious what people are thinking.

    For me AWS has appeared to be 25 times cheaper compared to lowend servers, plus it is a fully manage service. The main reason to migrate was to free myself from managing servers, which I did for over a decade, and I was even willing to pay more for this, but surprisingly the opposite is true. Interesting, isn't it?

    How can aws be cheaper than servers?

  • @trycatchthis said:

    @M66B said:

    @trycatchthis said:
    More and more hosts get bought out. The price increases, then clients start to look for alternatives.

    For example every provider here is likely cheaper than AWS. Because they probably cant offer what AWS does. If their privces start to get close to what a cloud provider would charge, then what would be to point of not going with the Cloud provider?

    I know the future is uncertain that's why I'm curious what people are thinking.

    For me AWS has appeared to be 25 times cheaper compared to lowend servers, plus it is a fully manage service. The main reason to migrate was to free myself from managing servers, which I did for over a decade, and I was even willing to pay more for this, but surprisingly the opposite is true. Interesting, isn't it?

    How long have you been using AWS? What kind of saving are you getting percentage wise compared to running the servers yourself?
    VPS offer predictable pricing but generally you may pay for capacity that you aren't always using. If you have a scalable setup then you can potentially save by paying for only what you use.

    I have been with AWS for 5 months now and I pay 25 times less compared to using a server.

    Note that this isn't about a busy WordPress website, but about an API service.

  • @coolgoole said:

    @M66B said:

    @trycatchthis said:
    More and more hosts get bought out. The price increases, then clients start to look for alternatives.

    For example every provider here is likely cheaper than AWS. Because they probably cant offer what AWS does. If their privces start to get close to what a cloud provider would charge, then what would be to point of not going with the Cloud provider?

    I know the future is uncertain that's why I'm curious what people are thinking.

    For me AWS has appeared to be 25 times cheaper compared to lowend servers, plus it is a fully manage service. The main reason to migrate was to free myself from managing servers, which I did for over a decade, and I was even willing to pay more for this, but surprisingly the opposite is true. Interesting, isn't it?

    How can aws be cheaper than servers?

    My reasoning is that servers you rent spend most time idling, but with AWS, or similar services, you pay only for what you use.

    So, if your server is doing 99% of the time nothing, you might be cheaper by using a cloud service.

  • coolgoolecoolgoole Barred
    edited December 2020

    @M66B said:

    @trycatchthis said:
    More and more hosts get bought out. The price increases, then clients start to look for alternatives.

    For example every provider here is likely cheaper than AWS. Because they probably cant offer what AWS does. If their privces start to get close to what a cloud provider would charge, then what would be to point of not going with the Cloud provider?

    I know the future is uncertain that's why I'm curious what people are thinking.

    For me AWS has appeared to be 25 times cheaper compared to lowend servers, plus it is a fully manage service. The main reason to migrate was to free myself from managing servers, which I did for over a decade, and I was even willing to pay more for this, but surprisingly the opposite is true. Interesting, isn't it?

    Please see this article and this video
    The Cloud Is Just Someone Else's Computer
    https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-cloud-is-just-someone-elses-computer/

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