Matt Heaton: ‘While virtualization techniques have improved dramatically in the last
10 years (Think 3D support, para-virtualization for direct access to
the hardware layer, etc) there is a fundamental problem with the whole
concept of virtualization that no one ever talks about.’
I don’t know why this isn’t getting more attention. You can cram a lot of shared hosts on a single box. You can get nowhere near the same number of guest operating systems using virtualization. As a data point, I am paying $6.95 per month for shared hosting, I am running 4 domains and countless applications. To keep this blog running continually on amazon elastic cloud would be $70 per month and a lot more labor.
As an aside, it is also worth noting that certain language runtimes are way better suited to shared hosting than others. Ones that support fork, shared libraries, process isolation and start fast, good. Those that start slow, rely on threads and don’t share memory not so good. hmmmmm