[The Stealthy One]

My personal opinion is that in another ten years, shared hosting as we know it will be offered for free, without ads, by all major players. Paid hosting will consist of VPS solutions, and anything more advanced than that (semi-dedicated, dedicated, etc).

What do you guys think on this?

[roboxooo]

may be ... but there will always be demand for quality shared hosting and for you have to pay

[The Stealthy One]

You think so? What if the average per-month price of a VPS was only $10/month? Would that change your opinion?

[tomfra]

Although I'd personnally predict a great potential market penetration for VPSes and for example with the HyperVM & OpenVZ combo it's already quite simple to begin offering VPS accounts, there will always be huge demand for shared-type of web hosting in my opinion.

It is not about the price itself. The vast majority of people simply lack the skills to manage a VPS server. They could hire someone to manage the hosting stuff for them of course, but then the price would go up quite considerably. VPS servers lack the simplicity factor for most people.

But it's 4:30AM local time and I really need to go to bed so no more philosophical thinking for now

Tomas

[The Stealthy One]

Maybe it's just me, but I have a vision of VPS solutions becoming immensely less complicated, to the point they work like shared hosting (in terms of what the end-user sees).

[tomfra]

Well the point is that with a VPS server the customer gets root access and is responsible for installing any additional software, firewall etc. If you give someone root access and that someone isn't proficient enough with the command line, he will very likely destroy the whole thing.

I love VPSes. Really, they are great and far better than shared hosting *if* you have the skills to manage them. But most people simply want to host their website(s) somewhere and know that everything is taken care of for them. You would have to offer them a fully managed VPS server webhosting. While this is possible, it will also be more and more expensive as human work will, unlike hardware & bandwidth, simply cost more each year.

And offering support for VPSes is much more difficult & costly than offering support for shared hosting because of 100s of unique VPS setups. If you can live with an unmanaged VPS account because you can do most of the technical stuff yourself, then VPS will always work great for you. But quite a lot of people are happy when they are able to send email and yet, they do want to have their own website hosted somewhere.

Although free hosting can do what they need, it is very difficult to offer quality support for it. And another problem in the case of freehosting is the ever increasing number of scammers abusing it. As a result, most freehosts limit the offered features seriously which is a logical outcome.

So my opinion is that paid shared hosting will stay with us for several years and it will be a viable option for those who lack the technical skills or simply do not need to use VPS and at the same time they want high quality support and uptime guarantee.

However, I predict that what we now call the "Reseller Hosting" will be almost non-existant in no time. "Reseller Hosting" is exactly the kind of hosting that will easily be replaced by VPSes in my opinion.

Tomas

[The Stealthy One]

Tomas, thanks for the insight. That was well-thought-out, though I think I must still disagree with you. Unfamiliarity with the command line could easily be overcome with some sort of graphical interface. Additionally, VPS setups can be standardized within each host, making the cost of support (for the host) a lot smaller than now. As for managed solutions, I think we might see some sort of automated system take over here, as well, with minimal human intervention (from the host) required.

But, as you say, paid shared hosting will be with us for awhile yet. And you also list legitimate concerns regarding free shared hosting. As of yet, there is still not a 100% viable method for keeping "Web villains" out of one's service. As a firm believer in the power of technology, however, I also think we may see some improvement in this area in the next few years.

It just seems to me that as infrastructure costs decrease even further, the cost of offering basic shared hosting will be so low that many main-stream hosts start offering the service for free - and with no ads. When this happens, other hosts will basically be forced to follow suit.

[aldo]

Yes there already is a free shared hosting. Its called 110MB.com lol with no ads anywhere on your site! They put it on there's to keep it off yours. Now you get 5GB space(up from 2GB) and 300GB Transfer(Up from 100GB) and when you activate MySQL($9.95 or you can post for it) you get unlimited Users and DB's

[The Stealthy One]

There are lots of free shared hosting providers - and there have been for years. The question centers around free shared hosting providers that also are ad-free.

[aldo]

Well 110MB is ad free if that what you mean. But isnt all free hosting technically shared? Even little ad free ones that only give you barely anything? o.O