Sometimes, I get a little nervous about this whole business of web hosting.
Not just nervous about the blank looks I’ll get when I tell pretty ladies what I do, either.
More nervous about the tingling feeling in the back of my neck that someday, perhaps not too far away, the entire web hosting industry is going to go the way of the betamax. Or, perhaps, that some collllooooossssssus will get into it and give it all away for free as a means to “capture eyeballs”.
When this nervousness overtakes me, I try and sit back, have a cheeseburger, and remember there’s nothing to worry about.
And then I feel better. Until I remember I’m probably lactose-intolerant. And then I start to get nervous again.
But hey, I’d rather ruin a new pair of underwear than worry about Google putting us out of business! And I don’t. Why? Because Web Hosting is Hard, and Google don’t want it! Nah, they don’t want it! They don’t want to give customers what is essentially a full-featured computer to run.. they want to give customers cool ajax-y websites that are easy to use and easy to mine for data.
And, even if they DID get into generic web hosting and give it away for free, there’s always going to be a (hopefully sizeable) market of people who don’t mind paying $8/month to know that the company they’re dealing with doesn’t make any money off them other than that $8/month.
So, that’s why I’m not much more afraid of Google than I am an average cheeseburger.
And I eat cheeseburgers for lunch.
But what about the entire industry?! It seems headed the way of the dodo, no?
After all, home and office connections are getting fast! Website-related software is getting better and easier to use. Already, the technically-savvy can host their own websites and email, and as time goes on, the bar to doing so will get lower and lower.
Great, I’m starting to get nervous again.
I’d better sit back, whip me up some pancakes, and relax.
Because, if you think about it.. the only way to have a succesful business is to offer a product or service for less than somebody feels like it’d be worth to do or make themselves. (Or else why pay you?!)
If everybody could pancake a pancake faster, cheaper, and better than the local IHOP, and liked cooking pancakes… there would be no IHOPs.
Fortunately for International Houses everywhere, this isn’t the case. And the reason is IHOP has expertise the average pancake-loving International-ite doesn’t. On top of that, the IHOP has spent capital to bring their cost-per-pancake to a level you’d be hard-pressed to match in the quantities of pancakes you’re likely to consume in a given Sunday morning.
Actually, those are the only two things you can base a business on. Expertise and Capital.
You can do something so well that people pay you for it only if you have more expertise in the field than them, or have spent more capital than them.
And in the web hosting industry, we’ve got both!
You may be able to set up your own servers at home, but can you for less than $8/month? Not unless you’ve spent the capital to be able to divide the costs among thousands of users!
And when a scsi card dies right in the middle of you flipping your pancakes, are you going to know how to fix it? Are you going to want to? Are you even going to notice? Not unless you’ve got a decent level of system administration expertise!
In ten years, thanks to good old Moore, everything we offer now you probably will be able to reproduce at home for $8/month.
But at that point, we’ll have even more expertise and have spent more capital, and it’ll still be worth the $8/month to outsource your web hosting to us, because we’ll have all kinds of cools stuff that ain’t even been invented yet!
And I still go to IHOP sometimes, even though I flatten pancakes for breakfast.
May 31st, 2006 at 9:38 pm
Welcome to the New Dream Food Network! ;-)
May 31st, 2006 at 10:30 pm
When will Dreamhost start offering their own dedicated server plans again (no hosting.com)?
Also, I can only hope that the server spec’s quadruple (4x disk, 4x RAM etc) like the shared-servers quadruple some time ago.
Sarah
May 31st, 2006 at 10:42 pm
Posts like these are great. I’m just glad there are people out there who actually LIKE doing this stuff and I can pay them to do it!
May 31st, 2006 at 11:52 pm
when google would start hosting, it sure will come with a price. You’d have to accept that if there’s something wrong with your webspace that you can’t shout at support because it prolly won’t have a support (free webhosting).
And datamining, no thanks, it could be usefull but i don’t like the way google does datamining.
I really like to pay for hosting because that creates a kind of obligation to the hoster to offer support and stability and that is what you guys give!!
mark this person as a loyal customer of dreamhost if google starts webhosting
June 1st, 2006 at 2:03 am
I love Google like a brother and he is better than all of his other siblings. MSN Search is the retard one wearing the helmet, Yahoo! tries to bum off money from you while stealing your girlfriends.
June 1st, 2006 at 2:53 am
Regarding that rather large cheeseburger — can I get fries with that?
June 1st, 2006 at 4:46 am
I have been with you guys for YEARS and I will continue to be with you guys for years :)
June 1st, 2006 at 8:07 am
I’m sorry, were you guys saying something? I was distracted by the delicious delicious morsels you’ve littered this post with. :)
June 1st, 2006 at 2:24 pm
Comic gold, Josh. I didn’t see that one coming.
June 1st, 2006 at 5:13 pm
aah I use to work for a type setting company, back before desktop publishing became popular. Not sure what yur worried about ;)
June 2nd, 2006 at 4:07 am
This post gave me physical pain as it reminded my body I’ve not eaten for ages… I still love you guys though ^_^
I’m one of those people who could host themselves quite adequately (and was for several years) — I’m here for the speed, reliability, and bandwidth, which are things I could never get from my ISP’s connection~
June 2nd, 2006 at 5:01 am
I’m also one of those people who is perfectly capable technically of setting up and administering everything I need. In fact, I do a lot of that at work already, even though I’m primarily a programmer.
However, I don’t particularly want to do it for my personal stuff. And, since I also tend to support email and such for my family, I like knowing that most of the time it just runs smoothly, but when there is a problem I can be confident someone else will be on top of it resolving the issue. They don’t have to track down me.
But then, solid email and list hosting for my domains were the primary things I was looking for in a hosting company, rather than web hosting per se. And I also really like the fact that y’all use debian and keep things patched, updated, and working well. I’m really paying for someone else to do it so I don’t have to. And it’s well worth the price!
And, of course, I’m one of those who uses a tiny fraction of disk and bandwidth you offer. I guess it’s nice to know it’s there if I ever did need it, but I have no issues with not actually having the physical equipment/pipes in place just for me until/unless I actually do use it.
June 2nd, 2006 at 2:01 pm
[...] Occasionally, I read a comment that just makes me laugh. This was a beauty. If you want context, you can find it here, but it’s really unnecessary. I love Google like a brother and he is better than all of his other siblings. MSN Search is the retard one wearing the helmet, Yahoo! tries to bum off money from you while stealing your girlfriends. [...]
June 2nd, 2006 at 11:51 pm
umm… NO.
bout google, I dont really like them actually.
eventough I’m still using it sometimes all my Search result just come up w/ the ads.
When I click Ads it goes to ads and more ads
click Ads >> opening ads >> more ads >> ads again >> neverending cycle.
n they got money from it… *LoL*
……
Thx for Dreamhost, you’re still the best Webhost ever. ^_^.b
June 3rd, 2006 at 7:50 am
Just as long as you keep prices at about the cost of electricty + $1 or so you should be Ok. Go above that and you’ll get your lunch taken away from you.
June 3rd, 2006 at 4:32 pm
it’s not google that will put you out of business……
it’s your horribly unreliable service that will…..
June 3rd, 2006 at 4:33 pm
it’s not google that will put you out of business……
it’s your horribly unreliable service that will…..
my sites, email and ftp have been down for hours but it’s so nice to see that this blog is up and running fine.
June 3rd, 2006 at 4:44 pm
I’m here killing time while your servers are down. I have to say your food pics just grossed me out! I may never eat again! Thank you for arranging for the diet that really works. There’s a business to go into if you get shafted on the web hosting.
June 4th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
While (like Scott M.) I am perfectly able to run and administer my own servers, I would pay to have someone do the boring bits. Bits like repairing the hardware when (not if) it fails. Like debugging flaky network connections. Like … I can think of lots more interesting and useful things to do with my time.
Ignoring the administration benefit, there is a huge performance benefit. Even if my cable providor allowed customers to run servers, the upstream rate is only a fraction of a megabit, and there are lots of hops from my boxes to the backbone. What that means is my website using a major web hosting service should be lots faster under no load (less latency), and lots faster when occasionally popular (lots of bandwidth).
While I really like Google as a service and as a company, I would rather not be utterly dependent on Google for an email and web host. The recent nonsense with the Chinese government proves that companies with many (profit) interests may compromise (in a way I would not like) when there is a conflict. Assuming DreamHost is not about to get into Chinese web hosting in a big way – I should be safe. :)
June 6th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
IHOPs are nasty. Homemade pancakes are the ones with expertise.
The same doesn’t go for webhosting, though. Cottage webhosting is kind of dangerous.
June 6th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
IHOPs are nasty. Homemade pancakes are the ones with expertise.
The same doesn’t go for webhosting, though. Cottage webhosting is kind of dangerous. DreamHost is much better just because it’s reliable and doesn’t break when Mr. Friendly Linux Geek upgrades to IPv6.
June 7th, 2006 at 9:03 am
Maybe I’m asking for failure, but are the people who inevitably post about outages trolls from 1+1? I’m not a pro-DH anti-troll or anything, but I haven’t experienced any noticable downtime in a year, and only once since I started hosting (um, three years now)?
And I third or fourth the comments above about being able to do myself. I switched way back in the day when 9NetAve (then XO, I think?) was throttling CPUs so much I couldn’t get a default install of Discus to post a single message. I never want to worry about configuring a web server. Ever.
One click installs, automatic updates, and pricing that is pretty much the equivalent to free, even if Google decides to roll out the exact same package tomorrow (which they surely wouldn’t), I wouldn’t switch. Y’all made hosting a financially viable option for some pretty fancy things compared to the competition (does anyone remember what it was like trying to get MT up and running about three years ago?), and that is worth long-time loyalty from me.
June 11th, 2006 at 1:57 am
Yes, Google is significant company. Someone told that he likes it like a brother, and thhink that this is elder brother for me (yonger brother I have in real%)). I like innovation technologies they use and I even copy some their ideas in my development works.. But as for hosting, I don’t think they will provide it. Look at Gmai.com. This service is in BETA for a damn long time, while it works rather stable. They just afraid to switch it to opened registration because they afraid of overloads and errors that will appera. This rearness is not empty thing. That will hurt company barnd, because everybody relay Google and if something will go wrong this level of confidence will go down in ppl minds.
That why I state that Google will not provide hosting in in the near future. Hosting business is rather risk deal. Even if they decide to provide somth like hosting I think it will be free (just not to take much responsibility) and with some special limitations. Or they invent new superstable hosting technology and in that case all hosting will cry D))
June 11th, 2006 at 11:41 am
AFAIK google’s official position is that they take products out of beta once they start becoming profitable enough to pay for themselves — if they go for several years and never turn a profit google can turn them off, and nobody can complain since they accepted the “it’s beta, deal with it” agreement.
July 1st, 2006 at 8:24 am
dreamhost is the new google :)
July 1st, 2006 at 10:25 am
From what i understand google is great for software but i dont think they would get into hosting cause of the “support” they would have to handle
July 12th, 2006 at 8:08 am
[...] http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/31/why-web-hosting-is-here-to-stay/ [...]
September 21st, 2006 at 1:22 am
As there are millions of webhosting company so I don’t think google will enter in this saturated market where all the time they have to keep watch on their clients. Google is best and will remain well known for there services in future.
May 23rd, 2008 at 12:58 pm
[...] Here’s how I figure. Honestly, Google does do a great job at email. And, we’re still offering everything we used to. And, offering easier integration with Google Apps / Gmail was one of our top 5 most popular suggestions. And, we’re still not worried about Google getting into web hosting, as I explained two years ago! [...]
July 11th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
[...] Here’s how I figure. Honestly, Google does do a great job at email. And, we’re still offering everything we used to. And, offering easier integration with Google Apps / Gmail was one of our top 5 most popular suggestions. And, we’re still not worried about Google getting into web hosting, as I explained two years ago! [...]