As you may or may not know I am the Lead Technical Architect at a company called 2nd Byte in Godalming, Surrey (UK).  You also may or may not know that we are currently recruiting for a Senior Web Developer to work in my team of approximately 15 developers (a mix of Web & DB Developers) as per the job description here.

2nd Byte is very much a work-hard/play-hard sort of company but is also a great bunch of people to work with (so good in fact, that I’ve rejoined the company and spent over seven years there).  Whoever finally gets the job will join this team, and also get a chance to help shape the technology at this industry leader over the next few years.

We do have a reputation of being a hard company to get into as we have very high standards for our developers (we do test candidates to check too) - but if you feel you are up to the challenge, I’d love to hear from you.

I received an email this morning from the illustrious hostmysite.com, the hosters of this very site offering their new Linux VPS plans to me. I’m always on the lookout for a deal so went to have a look at the pricing. In a nutshell, there are two plans that would appeal - a PHP5/MYSQL one for $29.95/month or a CFMX7 Standard one for $116/month.

Yup, $116…a month.

Now this kinda got me thinking. Why the hell is the cost of CFMX so much in a shared hosting environment? Sure, charge the full whack for a dedicated box, but why should the cost be so high in shared hosting and VPS’s? I can’t help thinking Adobe are missing a marketing trick here. Drop the cost of licensing for hosting partners such as hostmysite.com, so that people are able to host on PHP for the same money as CF. It’s no wonder people are not picking up CF when the cost is so much higher compared to other tools.
Normally the cost of CFMX is weighed against saved development time, but when I am hosting something like Feed-Squirrel on a shared box, and am paying for it myself, development time means nothing to me as I am doing it in my free time - for free. By re-writing something like Feed-Squirrel in php I could potentially save myself up to $1000 a year. I know I could use one of the cheaper/no cost solutions like Railo or Smith, but can you find hosting for them that has comparable cost to PHP?

Anyone think the same or have I missed something obvious?