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VPS is the way to go

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With the help of Talend Open Suite for the past couple of months, I got an ETL process into a deployable state today and started looking at my current hosting solutions. Since my main package is shared hosting with limited Perl capabilities, I created my Talend ETL project in Perl and tried uploading the scripts to run in the console. I spent a good half day debugging various errors in the console, adding various missing modules and modifying scripts, but one error after another kept popping up until I finally came to a conclusion: shared hosting is not the way to go. Why?

  1. Since the console is locked and jailed, there is no way to really customize the environment yourself without the help of support staff. Depending on your SLA, you may have to fork over money just to resolve that one issue. And there’s no guarantee that other issues won’t pop up later.
  2. If it’s a problem with your code, hosting support staff are not going to sit down and help you debug it. Even if you wanted to, you can’t even debug it reliably on the server yourself since you’re working within an environment that’s not yours to begin with.
  3. Shared hosting is a black box. Even if the hosting provider can guarantee resources, it always come at a cost of configurability and customization. Who knows what kinds of software they installed (or even worse -didn’t install) that could interfere and increase your response time tenfold.
  4. Cheaper packages may end up costing more in the end when factoring in support costs, lost time, and exponential increases in gray hair.

Unless your startup is heavily funded by angel investors (rarity in this day and age), I’d recommend a VPS solution first. The cheapest VPS I’ve seen being offered is $20/mth, so cost is not even an issue here. Once it’s off the ground and revenue starts flowing, the transition to a dedicated server is inevitable. Either way, you get to control the environment, you know what goes in and what comes out, and you’ll have complete confidence in your Production environment. The hosting provider’s job is handling the network/hardware issues.

Shared hosting is only for those who don’t know what they’re doing. Those that argue for time saved advantages should worry even more about hiring a competent tech instead.