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Ask HN: Why use hosting company instead of hosting your own website?
I recently set up a LAMP server at home and used DynDNS to point a registered domain at it. I found the experience so straightforward and satisfying that I'm currently wondering why people pay hosting companies (GoDaddy or whoever) to perform this service? What is the killer issue, bandwidth? Security? Support?
My sense is that for small-to-medium websites self-hosting is probably superior for lots of reasons. Am I missing something?
- Raphael 16y agoMost ISPs don't give you much upload bandwidth.
- alkavan 16y agoyou can't provide the same stability, bandwidth and connectivity with your home internet connection as host providers usually give you, although i know several web hosting companies that do feel like they sitting on an ADSL connection :\
- byoung2 16y agoYour home internet connection will not be as reliable or as fast as multiple redundant backbone connections. Check with your ISP, because hosting might be against the terms of service, even if the upload bandwidth seems sufficient for a small site. You can find hosting for as low as a few dollars a month these days, and for that price you get someone else to maintain the hardware, take care of software upgrades, etc.
- steveklabnik 16y agoThe root is this: is your job maintaining LAMP servers, or is your job running your business? I know how to maintain a server, reasonably well. But I don't want to actually do that. I'd rather just 'git push heroku' and be done with it.
- petervandijck 16y ago3 reasons: uptime (your internet connection), uptime (your electricity supply) and uptime (your hardware).
- mechanical_fish 16y agoIn addition to the things already mentioned here: Hosting companies have economy of scale. Because they are running hundreds or thousands of machines: - They can afford to pay people to stand by on call 24/7. Do you want to get paged in the middle of the night? Incidentally, did you set up Nagios and something like Pingdom and a pager service on this box in your closet, or are you just happy to go down for hours at a time? - They see all the common problems all the time. When you experience common problems -- e.g. database crashes and needs to be restored from backups, bad PHP configuration is eating too much memory on the box, DDOS attack needs to be parried with iptables -- you are going to spend hours reading instructions and applying them. Going to all that effort for the sake of one small box is kind of a waste. What you want is to amortize your skills over many, many boxes. That's what professional sysadmins do. The first time you have to spend a couple of hours reading some FAQs in order to keep your box running you will burn up 100% of the money you saved by not paying for a hosting service. Of course, if you're trying to learn what hosting is about trying to run your own box is educational. Though I'd still do that learning on a VPS or EC2 rather than struggle with a home network and a random home box.
- toast76 16y agoI'd actually say you've got it backwards. The bigger you are, the more sense it makes to host internally. The smaller you are, the more it pays to pay someone else. I don't know what your hourly rate is, but if I had to spend even one hour looking at ANYTHING to do with my own server, I would've been better off paying for it to be hosted somewhere else. The only way it would be at all sensible to do this is if you had no traffic, weren't selling anything and hosting the app was as much a hobby as the app itself.