Most webhosting services barely managed to offer encrypted FTP/SFTP before containers existed, most went with plain text FTP. When I worked in the sector back 2

Most webhosting services barely managed to offer encrypted FTP/SFTP before containers existed, most went with plain text FTP. When I worked in the sector back 2011 we had a customer with a hacked/stolen FTP password every other week. As far as features are concerned, yes, you can make a git server you can push to, but allowing users to get a full shell and pull from their git server is a whole other comfort level. More modern alternatives would include on-server development with VS Code, which we aim to support in the next version with port forwarding supported. As far as container security is concerned, if properly configured, these are still a sight more secure than trying to give users shell access without them. The UNIX permission mechanism is woefully inadequate for keeping users from messing with each other's stuff. This is obviously not a problem if you don't want to provide a shell service to users, but some services, like the LX Plus service at CERN mentioned in the other thread [1] is specifically that: a shell service for users to access. One of the problems containers (or more accurately, network namespaces) solve are the language or development servers users may start for their development needs. These often don't contain any extra security beyond binding to 127.0.0.1. However, on a shared server this is obviously not enough. The other problem with using purely UNIX permissions to isolate users in the webhosting sector is users messing up their permissions. Back in the day this was also a constant problem, so nowadays all webhosters run the webserver / PHP-FPM instance with the same user ID as the user uses to upload their code, often having multiple websites for the same user using the same user ID. This lends itself to cross-contamination between sites if one is breached. If the sites run on a different user ID, however, it becomes more difficult for a user to move data between them. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32790856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32790856