If you plan to offer a service tied to a website you make for your client, what are the advantages of self hosting compared to relying on third party services?
Static sites, CMS, newsletter, emails, form handling and more…
An easy example is forms: you can either use formspree or install one of the countless foss form handlers you can find online…
In my mind it’s definitely cooler to offer all the services your client needs + you can also charge for them without having to pay for 5 different plans on other platforms, just your VPS or dedicated machine, more income and less expenses. But I see it can be hard to manage outages sometimes or issues that can come with self hosting.
It’s offering a service vs being just a reseller.
My experience with self hosting stuff on my own (for my own use) so far has been quite good. I don’t use containerization and I carefully config everything needed the first time, then I reverse proxy through cloudflare, after that I rarely have issues and if I have I simply rely on logs.
In my mind it doesn’t seem too hard to install a couple of services and make accounts for my clients + fixing something not working every now and then.
My only concern with that is if one day I will want to stop being a developer, how will I handle the quantity of people relying on my server and everything I will hold.
Interested in your thoughts and experience about self hosting vs relying on third parts!
I run a “self hosting” business. My job is to solve said problems. What I am learning from my developing customer base is this, they would rather I be on the hook than them, they would rather I press the buttons that them, and so on. You get the gist of it. Where I host said services is up to me, provided it does not fail, is secure and they have root access when they need it.
If I get tired of this business, I will find a buyer and sell it and move on. Yes, it is a worthwhile venture. Horror stories though, it seemed easy to get into, till I had to get my first customer.