My guess would be: Traditional CMS you do the setup and plumbing in the server because you have full control Static website hosting you prebuild a website and

My guess would be: Traditional CMS you do the setup and plumbing in the server because you have full control Static website hosting you prebuild a website and push it up all complied and done but in a standard supported format, do it easily can go to different providers. There's not much in between, because you can't (easily) write code that is happy to run in two different systems controlled by other people with different plumbing under the hood... It's certainly doable, but the more you generalize the more complicated your code gets... and the less you can benefit from the vendor specific stuff (e.g. removing features that one side does not support ... Or adding code to use it if it's there -- which makes code even more complicated)... Edit: and to the point of code complexity: if you did this all yourself in an alpha release, you likely would make a company/product like forestry (mentioned elsewhere in this discussion) because you've made something some people would consider somewhat or very valuable