

Ask HN:  Why use hosting company instead of hosting your own website? - roadnottaken

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?<p>My sense is that for small-to-medium websites self-hosting is probably superior for lots of reasons.  Am I missing something?
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toast76
I'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.

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mechanical_fish
In 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.

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byoung2
Your 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.

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Raphael
Most ISPs don't give you much upload bandwidth.

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petervandijck
3 reasons: uptime (your internet connection), uptime (your electricity supply)
and uptime (your hardware).

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steveklabnik
The 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.

