phil@bajsicki:~$
Shared hosting is a scam
This isn’t the first, and won’t be the last time I rant against shared hosting, SaaS, and all the other ‘I want to be a landlord’ scams out there.
This time in shared hosting: friend of mine wants to set up a tech stack for their new agency. Website, email, CRM, the works.
(1)Yes, I realize it’s hypocritical of me to point them to Google, but we can’t save everyone. For someone who doesn’t grasp tech, having something easy and functional is excusable, especially if they don’t have the capacity or ability to sit and learn. There is a good amount of software which doesn’t have great/ accessible FOSS counterparts (speech-to-text anyone?) .
Starting with the basics, we talked a bit, and arrived at the conclusion that, since they’re not very tech literate, it would make the most sense to just buy a domain and set up with Google Workspace (easy!) and Google Sites (easy!). That’s about $15/mth. The domain is about $20/yr, which gives us a total of $200/yr for that simple set-up.
A reasonably speedy VPS that would handle this load would be about $60/yr, plus domain we go up to $80-ish a year… but you only break even on this after two years of use (not including maintenance costs if you’d hire someone for that.) Note the amounts are cumulative.
| Year | VPS | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | $200 | $280 |
| 2 | $400 | $360 |
| 3 | $600 | $440 |
| 4 | $800 | $520 |
This is based on a quick estimation that setting up a VPS, domain, website and email server (just the tech, no content or graphical design) would take a few hours of sysadmin time. Let’s call it $200.
The actual figure is only mildly relevant, as we can clearly see that as time passes, renting a VPS is much more affordable and sane.
Plus, you get to grow and expand your tech stack at no additional cost. There is a long list of available free alternatives to garbage software.
And it gets much worse…
When they asked their friendly neighbourhood web designer about setting a server up for them…
They got the following offer (verbatim):
- SSL
- 5GB space
- 1TB bandwidth
- 3 emails
- unlimited use
- free FTP
All words which the average person doesn’t understand. How do you even begin making sense of this if you don’t grasp how the Internet works?
The price tag? A very not cool $50/mth. For shared hosting with ridiculous limits.
I can’t fathom how a person can justify having these restrictions on a $50/mth plan. For that money you can easily rent a top of the line VPS that’ll dance and sing to any tune you play.
And how does it stack up? $600/yr makes for 600, 1200, 1800, 2400… you get the picture.
For the worst service at the highest price.
This is right on par with SaaS and vendor lock in terms of how bad this is.
Be ethical. Don’t give money to thieves.