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If you program for a living and you worry about hosting costs for small projects, you are misjudging your opportunity cost. You are valuing yourself way too low

by ef4 11y ago

If you program for a living and you worry about hosting costs for small projects, you are misjudging your opportunity cost. You are valuing yourself way too low. You're going to pour $5000 or $10000 worth of your time into a project, but then balk at spending $100 to host it long enough to see if it grows. Makes no sense. And if you are cash poor, you're much better off spending some of that project time getting paid, and you'll soon be able to afford as much hosting as you want.

staticelf 11y ago
This is kind of the point I am trying to make. Laravel Forge is selling me that time I would spend on configuration for a fraction of the price of other services. But yes, I agree with you, kind of. But my websites are never probably going to have a lot of visitors. I want to build up a network of sites that all give me a small amount of income. Perhaps in the future it will give me more income and then I could spend it more wisely.
- Zyst 11y ago
  The point I understood from your article makes is that the few dollars you are saving over having another language stack (Java/Python/etc) makes using PHP over them worth it. Which, as people here mentioned, shouldn't really be your main consideration. If you wanna keep programming in PHP that's perfectly fine, but all in all the minor price difference between stack hosting prices is a poor excuse to justify it.
  - staticelf 11y ago
    Yes, that is correct. Yes of course, I agree that it shouldn't be my main consideration. I will think about it, since I really want to switch programming language.
  - brightball 11y ago
    It also depends on the situation. He's said that he's looking for several small sites to provide extra income meaning that he's looking at it from a cash-flow perspective. From a cash flow perspective, hosting cost definitely is a factor. This is the specific type of situation that PHP is almost ideal for because it scales down better than most other languages since everything is loaded and processed on-request instead of booting up to preload. You can host 1,000 PHP sites on a single small server as long as the concurrent traffic doesn't outstrip the specs. With most other languages that have to boot and preload, you're restricted before traffic becomes a consideration. PHP's not the right choice for every situation but for his use case it's pretty solid.
emerongi 11y ago
Also, if you can use some other technology and then only pour 2000$ worth of your time into it, but have to spend 100$ more to host it, you're still winning. It's easy to shut something down and stop "losing" money, much harder (impossible) to get back the time spent on developing it. Essentially, your most valuable asset is your time. Optimize for time, not for money. Your time is worth much more.
shubhamjain 11y ago
I don't agree with these kinds of assessments which assume that you can always exchange money for your time. Let's suppose, I am bootstrapping something with X months of personal runway left. If I can exchange my "so-much-worthy" hours for money, I'll certainly do so and use it on my product but I don't think it is as easy as the calculations assume it to be because finding short-term-high-paying-gigs is not trivial. Instead of investing personal wealth, it feels more comfortable to just try cutting corners without impeding productivity significantly and in many cases, is not that as bad as presumed.
z92 11y ago
The time investment is one time. Hosting cost is recurring. I might be able to invest two months in a developing a project. But if it's not making any profit, I might still be hosting it for 5 to 10 years. Then it's a difference of $600 vs $12,000 depending on which solution I choose. Thats a significant difference.

by ef4 11y ago

staticelf 11y ago

This is kind of the point I am trying to make. Laravel Forge is selling me that time I would spend on configuration for a fraction of the price of other services. But yes, I agree with you, kind of. But my websites are never probably going to have a lot of visitors. I want to build up a network of sites that all give me a small amount of income. Perhaps in the future it will give me more income and then I could spend it more wisely.

Zyst 11y ago
The point I understood from your article makes is that the few dollars you are saving over having another language stack (Java/Python/etc) makes using PHP over them worth it. Which, as people here mentioned, shouldn't really be your main consideration. If you wanna keep programming in PHP that's perfectly fine, but all in all the minor price difference between stack hosting prices is a poor excuse to justify it.
- staticelf 11y ago
  Yes, that is correct. Yes of course, I agree that it shouldn't be my main consideration. I will think about it, since I really want to switch programming language.
- brightball 11y ago
  It also depends on the situation. He's said that he's looking for several small sites to provide extra income meaning that he's looking at it from a cash-flow perspective. From a cash flow perspective, hosting cost definitely is a factor. This is the specific type of situation that PHP is almost ideal for because it scales down better than most other languages since everything is loaded and processed on-request instead of booting up to preload. You can host 1,000 PHP sites on a single small server as long as the concurrent traffic doesn't outstrip the specs. With most other languages that have to boot and preload, you're restricted before traffic becomes a consideration. PHP's not the right choice for every situation but for his use case it's pretty solid.

emerongi 11y ago

Also, if you can use some other technology and then only pour 2000$ worth of your time into it, but have to spend 100$ more to host it, you're still winning. It's easy to shut something down and stop "losing" money, much harder (impossible) to get back the time spent on developing it. Essentially, your most valuable asset is your time. Optimize for time, not for money. Your time is worth much more.

shubhamjain 11y ago

I don't agree with these kinds of assessments which assume that you can always exchange money for your time. Let's suppose, I am bootstrapping something with X months of personal runway left. If I can exchange my "so-much-worthy" hours for money, I'll certainly do so and use it on my product but I don't think it is as easy as the calculations assume it to be because finding short-term-high-paying-gigs is not trivial. Instead of investing personal wealth, it feels more comfortable to just try cutting corners without impeding productivity significantly and in many cases, is not that as bad as presumed.

z92 11y ago

The time investment is one time. Hosting cost is recurring. I might be able to invest two months in a developing a project. But if it's not making any profit, I might still be hosting it for 5 to 10 years. Then it's a difference of $600 vs $12,000 depending on which solution I choose. Thats a significant difference.