what is the future of shared hosting?

[rockarolla]

is there future for shared hosting? I have the feeling that soon people who do not require much will go fo any of the free hosting providers and those who do business will change to dedicated or virtual hosts. This is simple deduction from the issues with the overselling and CPU and other restrictions.

This can lead to shortage of hosts for a while becasue many host providing shared hosts will be busted and the true hosting companies would need time to expand.

[kingofoverkill]

Rockarolla,

Interesting thoughts. Here is another possible scenario. What if the larger hosts were able to increase efficiencies greatly through cloud computing and what if the software to do so was free, open source software? Now imagine if a large host that had 1,000 blade servers that were stand alone shared hosts, where on average each server had 20% CPU idle time. If you put the cloud computing software on them, so that all server resources were shared, then you would free up 200 servers for more customers...in actuality, the cloud software would use up 5-10%, so perhaps you would have 100 to 150 servers to host more customers without adding more hardware! If you are saving 15%, you can pass that on to your customers and be more competitive in both price and uptime. So, now that $10 plan becomes an $8.50 plan. If the other shared hosting vendors can't compete on price AND uptime, then they may have to move to cloud hosting or find other ways to differentiate and target a more niche market, perhaps being a specialist in Blog hosting, etc.

[fazewire]

King Of Overkill,

I like the way you think, and I think that is very true.

I think all the small, over-promising and under-delivering shared hosting companies run by high schoolers will be run out of business by the larger shared hosts like 1 and 1 and hostgator.