I’ve just spent what felt like an eternity upgrading my personal site to the latest and greatest versions of Textpattern and Mint. Tonight, I’ll be repeating that process on a handful of other sites as well.
I love both these applications dearly, but the problem with this download-and-install-it-somewhere software model is that it’s a never ending game of catch-up. Tonight I’ll be up-to-date, next week there’ll be a new version that adds functionality, improves speed or patches a security vulnerability, and the process will start over.
In contrast, customers of Joyent, Strongspace, TypePad, Basecamp, Blogger, Blinksale and hundreds of similar hosted services have never had to install software, create a new databases, play with server configurations, back-up data, apply upgrades, ask their host for help or even think about what happens on the server side.
And these services don’t just make life easier for the customer. Hosted services have closed source and a controlled environment. That means there’s no problems with piracy and licensing, no problems with server compatability, clearer boundaries for support and a much simpler code base.
Enough of this downloading, installing and updating dance. You can keep your source code. I want high availability, low maintence web services that just work.
9 Comments
I sort of udnerstand your point but feel there’s a big opportunity to make the installed versions easier to upgrade. If it can be done on hosted versions, it should be doable on installed versions. Best of both worlds.
pwb: Sure, take a look at for instance moin-moin’s approach. You can install that as a system wide library and then your local installation becomes a two-line file. (Of course, moin-moin then doesn’t use MySQL but instead stores its data in flat files. Most applications will at least require a little bit of configuration.)
But the point is, as a developer for that to work, you have to do a lot of extra careful planning which is why it’s usually left behind. For hosted apps, you can’t leave it behind, and the whole user experience becomes a matter of just using the application.
I am actually seeing the wisdom of having hosted applications. But I am worried about what this means for TextThing
Sure—I’ll put my lifeblood into an external service and company, holding my data hostage to a monthly fee, possibly with no export option.
I’ll also be interested when all these applications can share authentication, interface with a web application hosted by myself without making outgoing HTTP requests from the server everytime someone does something that my webapp needs to interface with yours for.
And I’m sure I’d love to buy that ‘Accellerator’ thing, which is something you pay your own electricity bill for.. yet for some reason it charges a monthly fee?
And all this is oh-so-conveniently making the company more money than a one-time sale. Gee.
Look at Typepad. Look at EZboard. Recently, EZboard just lost an incredible, incredible shitload of data, even though they ‘kept backups’.
Why should I put my trust in an external company, hold my data to hostage, and pay a company a monthly fee because they chose a platform to put it on that conviently makes them more money—for a web application which I cannot modify in its function in any way?
It appears Mint will have one click update from now on. I also love my Mint, but will continue to face the problem with my WordPress install. However, hosting it myself gives me more control. I think it depends on the product.
Totally lame PR attempt here.
There’s no PR attempt here, and this isn’t really a discussion about Joyent’s hosted products either, although yes, we offer some, and will probably offer more.
I was simply reflecting on some challenges I faced with managing some download-and-install software which I’d happily let somebody else handle on my behalf (yes, for a fee).
Of course I’d want an easy way to export my data, of course I’d want to make sure I’m not locked in to a contract or insanely proprietary data format and of course I’d want to be able to do my own backups from time-to-time, that all goes without saying.
You say you want to modify the web app, and that’s fine, but I don’t. I’m totally sick of applying patches and tweaks to something only to have to re-apply them a week later when the software is updated.
You’re welcome to your own opinion and preference of course.
The real issue here, to me at least, is convenience vs. cost. I’m deeply sympathetic to Justin French’s irritation at constant and non-trivial-to-install updates to web apps. We shouldn’t all have to be our own IT staff when we already pay for hosting, but if there’s significant savings on the side of doing it yourself, it’s still tempting to put up with the annoyance. It seems like the cheap hosting providers are moving to differentiate themselves more and more by rolling bundled software into their hosting, and I’m hopeful this trend will continue (it’s cheaper and easier for, say, 1and1 to figure out how to deploy, say, WordPress on their servers once than for their users to figure it out over again a thousand times). And the reason this observation almost looks like PR (which I agree it isn’t) is that web-service companies like Joyent do such a good job of taking the maintenance load on themselves and letting their users get on with the real work. The problem is that, tempting as the Mixed Grill offer may be, small full-service companies like this are still losing the price war badly when you compare them to huge one-size-fits-all hosting providers. I hope the gap closes either by the full-service companies getting bigger and cheaper or by the big hosting providers getting easier and better supported. Maybe both will happen.
“Enough of this downloading, installing and updating dance. You can keep your source code. I want high availability, low maintence web services that just work.”
And if it doesn’t, or if it stops, you’re screwed. All the way.
Using open source software and controlling your hosting means what’s yours (the articles, the content) stay yours.
It’s the wrong answer to a real problem. The answer should be “we need better, simpler, easier way of installing and updating our software”. And not “I’ll give you all of that is mine, and pray your offer stay around, and stay the best one for me”.
When there is some kind of legal must-do about content exchange ; meaning when every hosted service has to provide a common way of giving me back my datas so I can switch hosting in a couple of hours even without strong tech skills, even in a case of bankrupcy or similar, then hosted services will be competitive. Until then, it’s toys.