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?
If its just a simple static page. Just use cloudflare pages. It scales to zero and would probably be completely free for your use case.
Vercel is even easier to setup but they don’t allow businesses on the free tier so it would be $20 a month for pro plan.
What are you trying to run? a VPS is pennies, and a phyiscal server isn’t much more. We have a bunch of servers that are $40 a month each and they come with 5 usable IPs, 32 gigs of ram, 1tb SSD etc. The cost of getting a static IP for home will be almost as much as a server. If you want less you can get less for a lot less money.
I’ve self hosted my own personal website for years now and it’s not really an issue outside of the power going out and my IP changing. I just update DNS and move on. But if this is for an actual work? Just pay the $10 a month, not having to worry about it is worth that money.
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.
If you’re very comfortable with containerization, networking, and security practices, plus you are a pretty decent full stack web dev, sure.
It’s pretty trivial to set up a separate business internet line from your local ISP. Depending on the volume of traffic, a basic load manager and reverse proxy, combined with strong firewalls and container safety would be sufficient for most SMB needs.
You don’t need much power to host a basic website. Setting up a local box with a low-impact distro, Docker, and some solid control-plane MGMT software should be plenty to host several dozen SMB websites.
There are a lot of technical and even legal considerations though. Do these small businesses need a web app on their site? Do they need a storefront? What about member-only content locked securely behind an authentication layer? Does your local ISP have rate limitations? Does your city/state/country have restrictions on offering business services like that? What is your liability if your setup gets hacked and your client’s data is stolen/exposed?
Ultimately, you have to answer the question: Why shouldn’t those businesses just go with an easy pre-made hosting solution like Squarespace, Wix, etc? Not saying there aren’t good answers to that, but from a business perspective, the businesses will want to know that.
As with anything in business, ask yourself, what are you able to offer that they can’t get easily somewhere else? I used to work for a tiny MSP that offered in-house data backups. Our clients paid a good chunk of money to have us backup their data to our own servers. I didn’t say anything at the time, but our clients could have gotten much more secure and faster backup services for cheaper using something like Backblaze or Synology’s S2 cloud backups.
Don’t find yourself unable to clearly and concisely explain to your clients what you can give them that they cannot easily get somewhere else. If it’s purely the principle of the thing, that’s totally valid, but make sure that’s what you’re selling to them, and also what they are looking for.
If you’re in Canada, Rogers (nee Shaw) and Telus small business plans both offer ‘static’ IPs (Shaw’s residential plans aren’t officially static, but they rarely change on a residential modem unless you are always switching out hardware). Telus business fibre 1GB plan offers up to 5 static IP addresses.
Then you must purchase one or more domain names and assign them to your IP address… depending on your business’s needs even small consumer hardware can run a web server just fine.
Have a backup strategy though! And be sure you actually test the restore procedure on a periodic basis!
Linux backups can range from home-grown ‘rsync’ scripts and hot-plug external drives as backup, to more fancy ‘Time Machine’ like backup things (I honestly forget what’s out there for Linux right now, I have my own rsync scripts to back up to external drives).
My home server is my own, but if money is on the line you want proper backup and failover even. Most Linux distributions are easy-peasy to set up with Apache or nginx web servers but if you’ve never set those up you’ll need to study lots of tutorials and manual pages.
If you don’t want to tend to security and backups yourself though, it might be best to find a hosting service.
Maybe for hosting a blog or something but I wouldn’t self host anything more important than that. Even then, Github pages support custom domains on their free tier so you don’t even need to do the hosting in that scenario