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Exit Shared Hosting Early

As a programmer, I would like to advice all web programmers to exit shared hosting as early as possible. But please take my advice from a technical point of view, not the business point of view. Shared hosting will go away and will be replaced by cloud computing. Re-acquire your programming skill towards cloud computing. See my other post on Why I Chose the Programming Languages.

Ten years ago there are 360 millions Internet users. Today, the Internet has 1.7 billion users, which is 4.7 times more users than a decade ago. And 10 years ago the bandwidth for the Internet access was relatively narrower than the generally available broad bandwidth of today. And today more people are accessing the Internet via mobile phones. Thus today, the Internet traffic is obviously many folds more than a decade ago.

Shared hosting was good when the Internet was small and when the traffic was relatively friendlier. Your website will either have visitors or none. When it will have visitors the traffic will be huge. Now any shared hosting server will not be able to cater for your website traffic. When your website load very slowly your visitors will go away.

Don't even think to move your website to a dedicated server when the time come. You will not have the time window to move your website to a dedicated server because your visitors will move away faster. And what make you think a dedicated server can cope with your website traffic? Looking at the Internet rapid growth a server is not enough for a website. You need a cluster of servers and mirrors. Where can you get those if not from cloud computing?

Forget about physical server and operating system. Start learning about how application scaling works. Learn how to scale your software and how to scale your data. Google App Engine is a good place to start.

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