James Ward shares how the hosting landscape has changed for web applications over the years and how you can avoid some of his middle-of-the-night pager nightmares.

Here's what to listen for:

• 00:47 What are the differences between hosting services?
• 05:19 What is a sysadmin?
• 07:14 What is the advantage of having people or a service do system administration for you?
• 09:23 What are some things that Heroku does for you that a lower-level server won’t?
• 13:36 Given all the choices out there, how do you think about where to host your application?
• 17:28 Why might one want to switch between servers?
• 21:58 What are container technologies and why do they matter?
• 24:42 What is virtualization?
• 26:44 Why are app servers fading away?
• 30:02 Are add-ons the way to think about services that are broken out?
• 32:06 Should startups use services like Heroku to start out or roll it yourself?
• 35:13 Why do people want to/think it’s easy to manage production systems themselves?
• 37:01 When should you begin thinking about the scalability of an app?
• 45:33 What is the right way to handle multithreading in Ruby?
• 48:12 What does “stateless” mean? Why should app servers be stateless?