Not to mention that in several cases, the managed service is run with Windows Server (think managed .asp hosting, or using a Windows-only middleware). So you have to tack on the extra resources for a Windows machine and the license costs.
Funny story (but not the ah-ah funny kind): such a service (hosting different customers on the same Windows machine) was still running in my previous company as of 4-5 years ago. They had long moved from physical hosts to VM, but were stuck with the legacy CMS/control panel which was more or less unpatchable (as in, the software editor didn’t exist anymore). About once a week, one of the host VMs would be taken over by hackers using one exploit or another. In that case they would kill the VM, boot a fresh one from a clean image, and start serving the customer data again after making sure it was clean. The service was not sold anymore but they had long-running customer contracts. It wasn’t making enough money to justify rebuilding it with modern software, but it was making enough that simply killing it wasn’t an option.
I was exclusively a Windows developer for 20 years - using Windows as a development and deployment platform. The cost of Windows in terms of licensing and resource was someone else’s problem.
It wasn’t until I started architecting and developing in cloud environments that the true cost of Windows became apparent - when the cost of every project I do can more or less be directly tied to me.
I still development on Windows but I found an appreciation for deploying to Linux.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not new to the field and in hindsight it makes perfect sense, but back then, I worked for corporations that hosted their own servers and never needed to host a site for a personal/small company.
By the time I got to the point where I would think about doing something on my own, VPS hosting was so cheap, I wouldn’t have thought about anything besides a VPS like Linode.
None of this is true. VPSes have existed since the early 2000s and have been in common use since the mid 2000s; Linode was founded in 2003, for instance. Shared hosting was popular because it cost pennies, whereas VPSes would run you $30+/mo, which of course is more like $5+/mo now.
Linode's kind of expensive. I've been using VPSDime [1] for a few years, since they give us 6 GB of RAM for $7 a month. For smaller stuff, I've been happy with RamNode [2], which is $3.50 a month for 1 GB of RAM. And you can usually find good deals on Low End Box [3]. Of course, at those price points, everything is OpenVZ, which is kind of annoying.
Running a full VM, especially on the tools back then, took a ton of resources. Even server class machines only had 4 or 8GB of RAM typically.