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!
Mh I get this, yes you pay more on outsourcing but usually you also get a service and an easier time, I would like to understand how much does it actually change…
Surely I’d have to understand how much it’s economically worth it. On super basic plans I remember even seeing something like “40€ for 1 year website CMS hosting” (on the cheaper side). Which is the cost of a basic VPS on which you can probably run 100 sites on low traffic… And charge each client 80€ for hosting + maintainance, it’s an easy great gain you’re getting per site. And maybe add something if they want also email. Great passive income in this case.
But on bigger plans tailored to devs more than to direct clients does it keep being worth it? How much would I spend to host 100 WordPress websites + email on something like Hostinger VS self hosting them all on my VPS?
I guess it also depends on your experience with self hosting, at first I was messing up when doing it, now I understood that most apps really just need mostly the same stuff, and it’s mostly all easy set and go. Unless I get hacked or get above some of my VPS limits I don’t see big issues coming if I’m hosting 4/5 services for my clients.
I already self host some stuff on my own and rarely have to touch it unless I wanna add features or something like that. I guess with more clients you’ll have to factor in scalability and/or managing multiple servers: all great stuff to learn but also yeah def more complex than doing a login and have a nice dashboard with all the services there ready for you…