Comments on: Hosting software rocks

By: Allen

Allen — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 23:14:46 +0000

Bandwidth used to be a big cost, but nowadays I’m not sure if even that is, unless you’re doing video.

By: Curtis Lassam

Curtis Lassam — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 22:42:00 +0000

Hosting things yourself is definitely the way to go. You can control the environment down to the letter, eliminating a whole class of obscure hardware and software bugs. You can abuse the GPL and charge monies for open-sourced software.

Of course, as a punishment, you have to deal with bandwidth, browser incompatibilities and a big reduction in the amount of power you’re able to dedicate to individual users. I think it’ll still be a long while before we see a pro video-editing studio appear on the web.

Once you’ve chosen ‘hosted’, though, you’ve tied yourself to a platform and a business model and even (in 37signals case) a brand. Changing it around is a risky, difficult and expensive move for the meager couple of bucks that you’d be extracting. I think even an MBA could understand that.

By: Sohail

Sohail — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 16:23:58 +0000

I blogged about the same thing here: http://uint32t.blogspot.com/2007/12/to-host-or-not-to-host.html

I wonder how you could host apps that are traditionally not hosted. I suppose if your market is large enough, you will find enough people who are interested in your product…

By: Bruce

Bruce — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 21:06:52 +0000

They’re onto something there too. Web app development cuts out many of the most painful aspects of building products. You get to work in more flexible languages, surrounded by a whack of reasonable text standards, using a large set of really nice tools. You write and test far less code … not to mention that by default you can connect your users to each other.

The whole web thing does add the running-a-service tax (hosting, uptime, etc.), but it’s really less of an issue than most people make of it.