Unfortunately however this mid-game between "traditional" and "scalable" makes it difficult to get people to move to a few things that would help which includes always using S3 so we don't need a central NFS server (which you lose a lot of performance to, even if it was just for some folders like the main code directories). And the reality is the majority of our customer base is on wordpress... and there are a lot of terrible wordpress developers which lead to all sorts of fun stuff.
Also PHP in general reloading the entire code base every page load is stable though somewhat intensive compared to a Rails-style application for people that want really high hit-rate sites but don't want to make everything static - for example someone with a shopping cart. (We have had customers exactly like that, wanting to hit a badly designed wordpress site with thousands of people at once in a rush sale).
So it is a thing.. but there are challenges. And honestly, surprisingly, getting people to move the needle a little from their basic cpanel setups is surprisingly almost harder than just changing platforms entirely because you have to educate people on how you want to be different to everyone else rather than selling a fun new solution.
Scalable no-downtime MySQL is still a total bitch though.
I feel like everything that was cool in 2010 has reached the point where its functionality either converged with "old tech" or just died because there were too many problems with it.
Examples:
- JSON wanted to be simpler than XML. Now it has schemas, JsonPath, comments (but only supported by some parsers), and is still pretty verbose and has way too few data types (datetime anyone?)
- MongoDB wanted to be a document DB with shards and eventual consistency, now it also supports ACID-like operations
- JavaScript was cool because it was untyped, now TypeScript is the new cool kid on the block. It's only a matter of time until untyped programming is the new hype again
- SemVer got somehow rediscovered
- People made fun of Maven, nowadays everybody and their mother are pulling directly from npmjs.org
All I want is user-isolated (suexec) shared web hosting on scalable web servers and SQL servers that someone else runs for me, where the extent of what I need to do is put PHP/Python/shell/whatever files in a directory on some network filesystem, and optionally wire up FastCGI if I want. It works well, and it's been doable for years because I used to run infrastructure like this. In the modern era you can even imagine extending suexec to create containers and not just switch user IDs if you want more isolation - as long as you have the container image locally, the individual steps of making a container (make some namespaces, make some cgroups, set a seccomp policy) shouldn't be noticeably more overhead than exec / process startup itself, and, again, FastCGI is an option.
That's "serverless" just as much as anything else is (i.e., the person running the website doesn't need to think about launching and operating servers, the platform takes care of it) and it's way simpler than using all these fancy tools on top.