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This time in shared hosting: friend of mine wants to set up a tech stack for their new agency. Website, email, CRM, the works. ">
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<h1 class="content-title">Shared hosting is a scam</h1><span class="content-meta"><p class="author">[Phil Bajsicki]</p><p class="date">2023-03-29</p><span>3 min read </span><a href="http://localhost:1313/tags/sharedhosting">sharedhosting</a> <a href="http://localhost:1313/tags/saas">saas</a> <a href="http://localhost:1313/tags/scam">scam</a> </span></section>
<section><p>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.</p>
<p>This time in shared hosting: friend of mine wants to set up a tech stack for their new agency. Website, email, CRM, the works.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th style="text-align: left">Year</th>
<th style="text-align: left">Google</th>
<th style="text-align: left">VPS</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: left">1</td>
<td style="text-align: left">$200</td>
<td style="text-align: left">$280</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: left">2</td>
<td style="text-align: left">$400</td>
<td style="text-align: left">$360</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: left">3</td>
<td style="text-align: left">$600</td>
<td style="text-align: left">$440</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: left">4</td>
<td style="text-align: left">$800</td>
<td style="text-align: left">$520</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Plus, you get to grow and expand your tech stack at no additional cost. There is a <a href="https://github.com/RunaCapital/awesome-oss-alternatives">long list of available free alternatives to garbage software.</a></p>
<p>And it gets much worse…</p>
<p>When they asked their friendly neighbourhood web designer about setting a server up for them…</p>
<p>They got the following offer (verbatim):</p>
<ul>
<li>SSL</li>
<li>5GB space</li>
<li>1TB bandwidth</li>
<li>3 emails</li>
<li>unlimited use</li>
<li>free FTP</li>
</ul>
<p>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?</p>
<p>The price tag? A very not cool $50/mth. <em>For shared hosting with ridiculous limits.</em></p>
<p>I can’t fathom how a person can justify having these restrictions on a $50/mth plan. For that money you can <em>easily</em> rent a top of the line VPS that’ll dance and sing to any tune you play.</p>
<p><strong>And how does it stack up? $600/yr makes for 600, 1200, 1800, 2400… you get the picture.</strong></p>
<p>For <strong>the worst service</strong> at the <strong>highest price.</strong></p>
<p>This is right on par with SaaS and vendor lock in terms of how bad this is.</p>
<p>Be ethical. Don’t give money to thieves.</p>
<p><a href="https://my.fsf.org/join">Join the FSF.</a></p></section>
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