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?
yes
NOPE
Well, you say your business sites, so I assume you’re okay with downtime. I would absolutely not self-host sites for someone else’s business, because if something happens to the hosting (ISP outage, power outage, bad update, hardware failure, accidental deletion, misconfiguration, ISP block, flood/fire/storm, theft, I can go on) then it’s my ass on the line. Simple hosting is cheap, spend the few bucks for a lot more peace of mind.
Exactly. It’s not just downtime to worry about, either. It’s disks filling up. It’s hardware failure. It’s DNS outages. It’s random DDoS attacks. It’s automated scans of the internet targeting WordPress. It’s OS, php and database upgrades. It’s setting up graphing, monitoring, alerting and being on-call 24/7 to deal with the issues that come up.
If these businesses are at all serious, pay for professional hosting and spend your time running the business.