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?

  • mlg@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

  • Xanza@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    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.

  • catloaf@lemm.ee
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    3 days ago

    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.

    • markstos@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      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.