Is Web Hosting Dead?

Over the years I have hosted websites on many different web hosting providers. From simple shared hosting plans to having my own dedicated web server but in this move to Astro this website is now not really hosted anywhere, instead it is hosted everywhere. In this case everywhere Cloudflare has a data center is possible for the site to be served from. That brings me to the question of this post. Is web hosting dead?

The ability to serve a website from the “cloud” without the need to run a web server is game changing. I no longer have to worry about this website being unavailable because the web server has a run away process. I no longer have to pay attention to server monitoring telling me the site is using to many resources. I have all of the benefits of hosting with none of the headaches. Granted this website is not doing anything fancy. I am not processing forms, or doing signups. But these things would be possible using Cloudflare workers or if I was on a either Netlify or Vercel using functions.

The only issue with web hosting on Cloudflare is that it is really only accessible for developers. It is not user friendly. I would never tell a small business owner that just wants a simple 5 page website to do this (unless they have a good understanding of how these things work) but I can see day when using Hostgator, DigitalOcean and other web hosting companies as they exist now is over. I will say it now web hosting is dead, it just doesn’t know it yet.