undefined | Better HN

0 pointscode_duck4y ago0 comments

Once my PHP app became mildly popular, I quickly learned the limits of shared hosting. At that point I was forced to learn all of the things that people avoid by deploying apps on someone else’s PHP server.

0 comments

motogpjimbo4y ago

But your app reached the point of popularity before you started needing to worry about provisioning and maintaining the infrastructure for it? That sounds like a win to me.

code_duckOP4y ago

It took about a month to reach that point and I had all sorts of confusing performance problems and errors (process per user limits, script execution time limits, inability to manage extensions, lack of access to logs and configuration) from the shared hosting infrastructure. I would have been better off if I realized from the beginning that shared hosting would never be adequate and just started it on a VM in Python.

moreira4y ago

Shared hosting has limits, but moving an app to a dedicated managed server (or managed VPS) is straightforward, especially if you were on a cPanel shared host (most of them are), since you can move accounts across servers with a few minutes of downtime at most.

Saying “I hit shared hosting limits, I would’ve been better off writing it in a different language and running on entirely different infrastructure” doesn’t really seem like the logical next step.

It’s like saying “I hit the limit of my barebones PostgreSQL server, and instead of getting a bigger instance I should’ve just built everything with NoSQL”.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse