> If you don’t manage your own servers I don’t think you can call yourself a professional developer. “My hosting provider doesn’t let me do X” is a lame excuse

> If you don’t manage your own servers I don’t think you can call yourself a professional developer. “My hosting provider doesn’t let me do X” is a lame excuse with cloud servers in the $10/mo range. Hosting (as a service, and shared hosting) is a very complicated business if you want to do it right. Also, when picking hosting providers, there are many things that factor into this. Social, political, and economic status are one thing (of the dev and the client). Another thing that comes to mind is the client's (or sometimes even dev's) location/jurisdiction (or the website's audience). The availability/locality plays a giant role in selection in non-western countries. For example, some European countries/ISPS have super-fast internet within them or up to the closest IX (internet exchange), but horrendous speeds towards anything beyond the IX; sometimes these are intentional (alas, curse politics) sometimes they're not. We had many clients that would migrate to us because they had these issues with previous providers because we were different from other hosting providers. Disclaimer: I used to work for a hosting company