If you are reading this blog on netlify please head to our new domain nullrequest.com. At the start of October the netlify subdomain will be taken down. In this post I wanted to talk about why and why not you should self host. When I decided to self host it wasn't at the drop of a hat. I spent a long time thinking about if it was worth moving to my own hardware. In the end I moved to my own hardware because I had a lot of projects I wanted to do and in the end the costs of hosting online would have ended up being too much for me,
Why should you self host your website
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costs Often times hosting charges maybe very cheap for a small to medium size website. However it is always imperative to plan for the future. Hosting charges often sky rocket and become unavailable for many people. Originally when I took up using netlify I assumed it would be viable in the long term. However I found that too do many of the things I wanted too it would cost more money than I could spend on this. I did think about using digital ocean but that becomes vastly more expensive once your site becomes a bit larger.
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control When you use a service like netlify you lose control of many things because you yourself do not own or control anything netlify uses. The things I wanted to do on my server would have been impossible without having access to low level things like the command line or choosing what OS you can run. Moving to my own hardware has changed how I do many things.
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learning If you have ever wanted to learn more bout how servers and the such works this is the best way too. You have the power to do whatever you want. Tinker away to your hearts content, break everything. You will learn so much by running your own server.
Why shouldn't you
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Hackers Anything and everything exposed to the internet will become a target for any hacker. Its a sad fact of life. While you could say you will learn how to protect your self from "attacks" some times its just not worth it. If you need a good stable system you should look into a online service. This is actually heavily mitigated by using a service like cloudflare who sit between you and your users.
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ISPs Some internet service providers(ISPs) will want you to pay for a bussiness connection which can be more expensive then hosting online. At the end of the day this one is down to personal preference. If you don't mind risking a knock on the door asking you to stop you can do pretty much what ever you want.
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Down time With services like AWS you are given assurances on down time. How long your service or website will be unaccessible to your users/readers.
These are some of the pros and cons of self hosting. I hope these could help you find a better understanding of the risks associated with self hosting.