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’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.
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).
Yeah. I’ve run plenty of services from a computer sitting in someone’s office, or in my living room, while they’re in-production-while-in-development. Sometimes it makes sense. But it’s just not something you want to deliberately aim for as the solution. What if the power goes out? What if your motherboard dies? What if the toilet overflows when you’re not there, and floods the place?
Just get a dedicated service and pay them their $10/month and have them worry about all that crap for you.
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 but why would the company run by the crazy person be the only safe place?
It’s open source. Just find a different host that isn’t run by a known unstable human. Literally any other. That would be my feeling on it, at least.
You’re not wrong. Again, my logic for that the crazy person is on the warpath towards other hosting companies. 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.
Mullenweg isn’t going to do that to his own company. I think Mullenweg is a piece of shit, and I would steer clear of wordpress.com. My previous comment pointing towards .com is dumb.
Ah, I got it. Yeah, it makes sense, WP.com is moderately likely to keep working fine probably, it’s just that it would make me nervous at this stage. I just don’t think he can do anything to really “punish” Bluehost if they’re using his software in some way that displeases him. WPEngine’s mistake was getting tangled up into a business relationship where they were depending on listings and APIs and things. Although, it probably seemed like a good idea until their business counterpart went off the deep end.
Agree. I’d be nervous about it too. Mullenweg seems pretty unhinged at this point.