Will Cloud Hosting Kill Shared Servers?

Rackspace Cloud general manager Emil Sayegh has made a pretty bold statement: “Over the next five years, shared hosting as we know it will be made obsolete by the cloud.”

Could it really be the case that cloud hosting is so revolutionary, it completely kills off the shared hosting market?

How Established Is Shared Hosting?

All of the web’s largest hosts offer shared hosting. Around the world, millions of dollars are invested in equipment, expertise and infrastructure to make shared hosting profitable.

Hosts could theoretically convert their shared space to cloud hosting, but customers probably wouldn’t see much benefit, at least at a smaller level. The cloud’s great for large, established sites; for tiny sites, it’s not quite so good an investment.

It might take some time for cloud hosting to become affordable to the hobbyist user.

A Place For the Cloud 

We’ll almost certainly see the cloud push hosting forward in other ways. For example, hosts could sell cloud services alongside other shared hosting products.

This could create a new hosting ecosystem alongside shared and dedicated hosts, but it’s unlikely the cloud would replace anything we already have.

There is plenty of room for everyone in the hosting industry, and customers have enough varying needs to make shared, cloud, VPS and dedicated hosting viable options.