Web hosting deciding to pay for hosting or host your own?
- by pllee
Is there a guide out there on how to choose when to pay for web hosting vs. hosting your own? Assuming that root access is a must I would like to compare things like cost, scalability and personal stress.
Here is what I could come up with.
Paying for web hosting:
Benefits:
Much cheaper for a small scale. I assume anything under $50 a month would be cheaper than paying for the bandwidth of hosting.
No stress in dealing with power outages, server restarts or internet going down.
For the most part less busy work involved with setting up.
Negatives:
Cost goes way up when higher specs are needed (for example monthly cost triples with ability to use 8gb of ram that you can buy for $90 ). This means you have to target a particular ram usage and monitor so your instance stays within the threshold.
root access for the most part is a premium.
You may get tied into a vendor specific deployment process.
Hosting on own :
Positives:
100% control of specs and software.
When you get past paying for the bandwidth you get much more bang for your buck by building your own machine.
Negatives:
Doesn't make financial sense if bandwidth costs are more than web hosting costs.
Having to deal with power outages, server restarts or internet going down.
I think the best of both worlds would be if there was a place that dealt with bandwidth, power outages and server restarts but you provided your own server. Kind of like a 24 hour day care for a server. Does anything like that exist?
