Is it feasible to self host websites for small businesses? I’m trying to do some research on the amount of infrastructure and stuff you have to know from a security standpoint… I’m fine with building and hosting stuff locally for me but I’m tempted to move to hosting some of my business sites as well.
Does anyone have experience and can give me some advice one way or the other?
It depends on what it is really + convenience. There are lots of morons out here running basic info sites on full beefy datacenter VMs instead of a proper cloud webhost service.
The most you’d be getting out of cloud is reliability. Self host assumes you don’t have any bottlenecks (easy enough to pass), but also 99% uptime which is impossible unless you are running with site redundancy (also possible, but I doubt how many people own multiple properties with their own distribute or private cloud solution).
if 95% uptime is acceptable, and you don’t live in an area with outage issues from weather, I’d say go for it. Otherwise, you can find some pretty cheap cloud solutions for basic websites. Even a cheapo VPS would probably work just fine.
As someone who’s set up and managed critical business applications I would say that it’s perfectly fine to host your own provided you have decent hardware that’s capable of doing what you need and as a dedicated business line to provide connection.
If you try to run mission critical business applications on a home internet connection you’re going to have a really bad fucking time. But hosting business critical applications on appropriate hardware and a 1Gb/s business connection with an SLA is going to meet 95-98%% of all business applications.
If something like that sounds expensive or too difficult to do then it’s too expensive or too difficult for you to host yourself. Just go with a provider and sidestep self-host.
I think it’s also important to consider how critical the website is. Worked for and with companies where their website being down wouldn’t be a major issue and others where it would stop them being able to operate.
Is it feasible to self host websites
yes
for small businesses
NOPE
Well, you say your business sites, so I assume you’re okay with downtime. I would absolutely not self-host sites for someone else’s business, because if something happens to the hosting (ISP outage, power outage, bad update, hardware failure, accidental deletion, misconfiguration, ISP block, flood/fire/storm, theft, I can go on) then it’s my ass on the line. Simple hosting is cheap, spend the few bucks for a lot more peace of mind.
Exactly. It’s not just downtime to worry about, either. It’s disks filling up. It’s hardware failure. It’s DNS outages. It’s random DDoS attacks. It’s automated scans of the internet targeting WordPress. It’s OS, php and database upgrades. It’s setting up graphing, monitoring, alerting and being on-call 24/7 to deal with the issues that come up.
If these businesses are at all serious, pay for professional hosting and spend your time running the business.
Maybe for hosting a blog or something but I wouldn’t self host anything more important than that. Even then, Github pages support custom domains on their free tier so you don’t even need to do the hosting in that scenario
Self hosting websites? Easy
Self hosting something for a business? Run for the hills. It will not end well and you would be much better off with something more business standard.
It’ll be vastly cheaper and easier to just get hosting somewhere.
Wordpress hosting (edit: THIRD PARTY Wordpress hosting, Bluehost and Hostinger are decent I think, see below) is fine for most small businesses and starts at about $10/mo. You can go fancier and more reliable and go up to $30/mo or something, or if you really need your own VPS you can go with Vultr or Hostinger and get a pretty similar price range for pretty much whatever you want to do.
I think the only reason to self-host is if you have some crazy special hardware or legal issue, or your own dev stuff that you don’t want/need to push to “the cloud” to put it online. Otherwise it’s such a buyer’s-choice market that it’s hard to justify.
FWIW, it might be better to avoid wordpress hosting UNLESS you go with hosting from wordpress.com, since there’s kind of an all out war in the wordpress world right now and the fallout to people who just want their websites to work is unknown.
The tl;dr is that Matt Mullenweg, wordpress founder and owner/CEO of Automattic (which is the company that runs wordpress.com), has engaged in a Trumpish crazy war with wordpress hosting engine WPEngine, and in doing so has arbitrarily (in the name of his war) been doing crazy shit with the open source wordpress project.
EDIT: To be clear, I am NOT recommending wordpress.com. My logic in saying what I said above is that Mullenweg is being very hostile towards other hosting companies, specifically WPEngine. For a time he had cut WPEngine off from wordpress.org, which meant thousands of regular people and business running wordpress couldn’t update their plugins or wordpress core because they had no access to the .org registries.
It’s pretty unlikely that Mullenweg would cut his own for profit wordpress hosting company (wordpress.com) off from wordpress.org (the open source repo for the wordpress software and a vast majority of the plugins). And to be clear, I think Mullenweg is a piece of shit, and if it were me making this decision, I’d rent a vps and host it myself. It’s really not that difficult.
Yes yes this is a very good point, stay well clear of Wordpress.com, Automattic, or any similar nonsense. All I meant by “Wordpress hosting” was managed hosting from some third-party place like Bluehost or Hostinger. The software is fine, it’s all open source and the worst that will happen is 6 months from now, it’s not getting a lot of feature updates because the core company that was making it has imploded completely, and someone from the community has taken over security updates.
But yes you need to stay clear of the clusterfuck while it’s going on. Don’t use Wordpress.com or anything adjacent to it.
Edit: Wait, I didn’t even read closely enough. Why would Wordpress.com be safe? I had some vague impression it was connected with Automattic in some way, although I’m not sure, maybe it is just one of the third-party companies. I just feel like anything that’s in any way adjacent to Automattic or anything “official” about Wordpress would be best avoided for a while.
Mullenweg owns wordpress.com. It’s arguably the only safe place to host WordPress since it’s his company and while he seems willing to burn all goodwill down to the ground for wordpress open source, hes (probably) not going to burn his own company and cash cow to the ground.
I mean, it’s not a great option, and I may be stupid for saying that, but that was my reasoning for saying so.
TBH, I’d just host it myself if I was going to do it.
Yeah… and unless you really, really enjoy configuring your own stuff and tinkering, a hosting service is much easier.
I happen to be insane, and enjoy that stuff. And it’s not a business server (well, not anything big anyway).
