Performance / convenience
One of the greatest challenges our PHP PaaS startup is facing is not a technical one: We need to change the way people think about hosting. Today there is still too much attention on the performance / price ratio. Think different.
Of course i browse Hacker News for fun. But it is also a good source to learn about our target audience with lots of threads about PHP and hosting. Some days ago there was a discussion about an article by Ronald van Woensel. He compared the performance of three hosting services: Digital Ocean, Linode and Amazon Web Services. Most of the comments discussed the quality of the benchmarking and other services that were missing in the list. I posted:
My two cents here: Benchmarking is all fine, but from my point of view, the performance-price-ratio is not sooooo important in hosting.
This discussion reminds me of PC customers buying behavior in the 90ies. What's better AMD or Intel? ... Nowadays other features are key: What's the weight of this device? How thick is it even? Apple has changed the way we look at these things today.
Convenience also matters in hosting a lot. How much time do i have to spend to have my app up and running? Do i really want to set up and maintain everything myself? How good is the support? Do i want just bare metal computing resources or a solution provider with an eco system?
What matters the fastest server ever, when your queries are slow (because of poor design)? The performance of any app/website relies heavily on the engineering skills of the developers. See caching, see i/o load, see frontend technologies, see page load, see #perfmatters.
It is easy to say that AWS just sucks and is overpriced. Think again, what is AWS really charging for? What does it cost to develop and maintain a website compared to what it costs to host a website? Are virtual private servers or containers the future of the cloud? Another example: Is horsepower still so important to you when buying a car? What about design and fuel consumption? Do you need your own car at all? Maybe car sharing is an alternative?