PHP optimization can be direct sold to hosting companies. They want it - they want their shared cloud hosting to use less resources, they want it to be faster. Because faster PHP means more clients on less servers, which means more money.
Take the percentage increase over the "classic" optimizer, multiply by total hardware costs of the hosting provider. The result is the dollar figure that it will save the company. Now your sales pitch is "Our software costs $X and will save you $Y > $X", which is a familiar and usually successful enterprise software pitch, since it is pure cost savings from the POV of the customer.
The tricky part is getting integration costs down to < $Y - $X, which is why the most successful enterprise products tend to be turnkey solutions like CloudFlare or AWS that build off already existing APIs. New programming languages usually fail because there's a massive hidden cost in learning the language and rebuilding the ecosystem that is greater than any potential savings the language could offer.
Things like HHVM are frequently not suited for shared hosting environments
So what can be done to make things like HHVM suitable for shared hosting?
It's a huge market, and a difficult problem to solve.
I think the big question is: what is the cost/risk/reward benefit is for the hosting providers.
You need to be cheaper than buying more hardware, safe enough to install without breaking everything, and provide a significant improvement in e.g. the number of hosts per server.
> It's a huge market, and a difficult problem to solve.
It's a market I expect will go away entirely. You can get VPSes for comparable pricing to shared hosting these days - DigitalOcean is $5, Heroku is free for the first dyno, etc.
It's a market I expect will go away entirely. You can get VPSes for comparable pricing to shared hosting these days - DigitalOcean is $5, Heroku is free for the first dyno, etc.
I'm not convinced the market will go away.
There are plenty of people who:
- Want hosting
- Don't have the technical abilities and/or time to set up a VPS
- Just want something that works - right now this very second
- With an easy-to-use control panel
- And want to pay $5 - $10/mo for the pleasure
Cheap hosting for non-technical and/or busy people is huge and I just can't see it losing market share to VPSes.
PaaS like Heroku is more or less exactly what such people want, isn't it? See the "deploy to heroku" buttons you see on more and more project websites.
Looking on their main homepage again with that in mind: I have to agree, such potential customers probably wouldn't realize that this is what they want. So yes, there is potential for someone to make a Heroku for that crowd.
