Once my PHP app became mildly popular, I quickly learned the limits of shared hosting. At that point I was forced to learn all of the things that people avoid by deploying apps on someone else’s PHP server.
But your app reached the point of popularity before you started needing to worry about provisioning and maintaining the infrastructure for it? That sounds like a win to me.
It took about a month to reach that point and I had all sorts of confusing performance problems and errors (process per user limits, script execution time limits, inability to manage extensions, lack of access to logs and configuration) from the shared hosting infrastructure. I would have been better off if I realized from the beginning that shared hosting would never be adequate and just started it on a VM in Python.
Shared hosting has limits, but moving an app to a dedicated managed server (or managed VPS) is straightforward, especially if you were on a cPanel shared host (most of them are), since you can move accounts across servers with a few minutes of downtime at most.
Saying “I hit shared hosting limits, I would’ve been better off writing it in a different language and running on entirely different infrastructure” doesn’t really seem like the logical next step.
It’s like saying “I hit the limit of my barebones PostgreSQL server, and instead of getting a bigger instance I should’ve just built everything with NoSQL”.
I looked into a dedicated managed server and it did not give me the flexibility I wanted. Fewer resource limits, but the lack of admin rights is about as bad as shared hosting… Can you imagine having to contact support when you want to upgrade an extension or something? Maybe if you have no sysadmin skills that would be a good choice. I can easily run a server myself and I don’t want support staff at some random host administrating my server for me at all. I think I tried a managed dedicated server for about two weeks before switching to unmanaged.
I did what I’m describing very successfully 10 years ago and I had a very good reasons to make these decisions at the time.
I mentioned python because I ended up re-writing everything in python two or three years later. You’re right that it’s not related to this, other than that trying to run a python app under shared hosting was really difficult.
I moved to a unmanaged VM (this was 2008, first Slicehost and then Linode) since I’d been using Linux as my main home OS for 10 years anyway.