jsamuel

In markets such as hosting where differentiation is largely about quality of support, brand, and marketing, there are many different reasons why customers choose their hosting company. Some people will stay with their existing host. Many others, both existing and new customers entering the market, will seek out new solutions or be attracted to a different company for varied reasons (poor support experience with existing provider, recommendation of a friend, strong marketing attracted them, identified more closely with the brand values, etc.).

I'm not sure but it may be you're looking for an explanation of why consumers choose one product over others when the consumer doesn't have the full knowledge or information to make an ideal decision (regardless of whether they often believe they do). Brand and marketing have a huge impact in those cases, tied in with the values of the customer base driving who they trust and want to do business with.

There's a huge market of people who want to purchase managed hosting, not be responsible for their own servers. Think of the customers (such as WordPress developers) of any traditional hosting company like DreamHost.

The purpose of HostLaunch is to make it extremely easy to start your own managed hosting business to sell web hosting services in that same market.

It's only necessary for older servers (e.g. Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04) where people haven't done this already.

At ServerPilot, we decided early on not to support HHVM for similar reasons: we could see PHP 7 was going to offer the same performance benefits without the pain, breakage, and downtime of HHVM.

Early on, before PHP 7 was released, we had to explain this to many of our users who use ServerPilot to host WordPress, Magento, Laravel, and other PHP apps. They often thought there was no downside or risk with HHVM, it was as simple as dropping it in as a replacement. Nowadays, with the hype around HHVM dying down, we don't get requests for HHVM support much anymore.

For a huge company like Facebook, HHVM makes a lot of sense. And the existence of HHVM really sped up the PHP 7 development efforts and provided a great benchmark for how fast PHP 7 could be. So, the PHP community should be very grateful to Facebook for that even if HHVM isn't the future of PHP.

> I wonder if people really do use ownCloud on shared hosting

DigitalOcean and other VPS providers are popular for hosting ownCloud.

Given how many people are uninspired and undirected in their lives, it's a wonderful privilege to have something you know you want to do. On top of that, it's amazing to be in a position where you can make it happen.

I've got a lot of similarities with your story.

I dropped out of EE in 1997 when I was 18. A few years later, in 2003, I was about to begin studying writing and literature when I realized that my hobby-become-job, programming, was what I was truly passionate about.

At first, I tinkered with useless online courses (they were much more useless ten years ago). I finally put life plans in motion so that I could study CS at a university. I began studying CS in 2006 with the goal of becoming a security expert. I got my undergrad degree in CS when I was 30.

While an undergrad, I got involved with research and decided to go to grad school. To give me more experience, meet more people in my field, and generally improve grad school options, I took an extra year doing research in a CS department before applying to grad programs. In that time I published a research paper with people I'd admired from before I went back to school. I got my choice of top research programs and went to grad school in 2010.

In 2012, I realized academia wasn't for me and had a startup idea I wanted to pursue. Now, two years and a huge amount of learning and new experiences later, I've got a quickly growing startup with amazing people on our team. I no longer write much code, but I love my new challenges every day.

You don't know what you'll end up doing, but if you know you want to study CS, then start as soon as you can. Life's too short to delay doing what you know you should do.