It takes only a few minutes to put a website online, but it takes a lot more to maintain it. Much like building a house requires purchasing the piece of land where you will build, your website requires a web hosting service that will make it available for your visitors. With emerging technologies like Kubernetes, Edge Hosting, and already established ones like Cloud Hosting, you will have much information to digest and only one decision – which technology to choose.

While choosing a fully-managed Cloud Web Hosting provider like HostArmada is the right choice, often, the overwhelming amount of information on the web will make you think that Self-Hosting your website is easy and will save you a lot of money. While that can be true, creating your own web hosting environment matching the quality of a web hosting provider will be a challenging task no matter your technical background.

Today we will give you seven reasons why you should restrain from Self-Hosting and trust professional hosting instead, but before that, let’s talk a bit more about Self-Hosting.

What is self-hosting?

Self-hosting is when you own the entire infrastructure that contains your website’s data. At first glance, that means you will only need a powerful server, and you’re done, but there is far more to it. In general, self-hosting is an acceptable solution only for governmental agencies and big corporations which don’t want any of their crucial data stored outside the security of their offices. Needless to say, they have entire divisions which take care of the process, and while it’s highly expensive, they deem the information they have much more valuable.

On the other hand, self-hosting for personal websites or small businesses is not only overkill, but it can be much worse for the website and its security. To illustrate our point, we created a list of the top 7 reasons why self-hosting is bad. Don’t get us wrong, though. There are far more reasons, but to be brief, we will showcase only the top 7 of them.

Self-hosting is very complicated

While at first glance, self-hosting might sound like an easy task, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Understanding the entire infrastructure behind how your website works requires much knowledge. In addition, you need to know how to configure the web hosting environment for your specific needs. If that doesn’t sound like a challenge, understanding every aspect of DNS, Databases, web servers, security, control panel, and a ton of other terms will probably deter you from pursuing a self-hosting option.

If you want to self-host, you must be prepared to climb the extremely steep learning curve. However, once you have conquered it, you will realize that delegating your hosting to a professional hosting service provider is the best option.

You will need truly expensive infrastructure

Often the web hosting service is built on top of a server. That very powerful computer stores your website’s data and delivers it when asked. Naturally, the more users you receive and the heavier the data packages that need to be transferred, the more influential the server must be.

For example, if you have a blog post with little designer decorations, a single requested data package will be small (1-2 MB per post). While the text is not that heavy, according to current standards, you need high-quality pictures that pump the size. So, whenever a user asks to see the blog post, your server will have to transfer this information. Naturally, if you have videos, the package sizes can skyrocket pretty quickly. Thus you will need one extremely powerful machine to compensate. Can you imagine if your server gets 100 requests for 500 MB packages? You don’t need to imagine it. This happens every day. If your server is not powerful enough to keep up, it will simply crash and turn off, rendering your website useless.

While each server consists of only five main components – a motherboard, a processor, storage, RAM, and networking, all of them must be top-shelf. A good server may cost between 5,000 and 10,000 dollars. For those expecting more massive audiences, the price might even go higher.

Self-hosting demands an enterprise-grade internet connection

If you think you can manage to self-host with your regular consumer-grade internet, you are not on the right path. You may have the highest package your operator provides, but if your website goes viral, this will hardly be enough. Instead, if you want to grow your audience and keep your website up all the time, you will need a stable internet connection that goes beyond the regular consumer plans. Your server needs to be connected via redundant connections to the internet. Only this way can you guarantee continuous uptime for your server and, more importantly, fast and unobstructed delivery of data packages to many users.

Naturally, these types of connections are not very cheap. The market varies depending on locations and size, but typically it goes between $1000 and $2000 a month.

Self-hosting is way more expensive

As it has become evident, self-hosting can be pretty expensive. While the server alone costs a lot, its components will have to be changed over time, so you must allocate an annual budget for substitutes and repairs. Moreover, as already mentioned, the internet will bump the cost significantly. That, however, is not the only cost you need to consider. To be able to self-host, you will also need a static IP, which costs more than the regular one.

Furthermore, you will need to buy licenses to several software products, which, although not shockingly expensive, add to the total cost.

Another spend you will have to make in regard to your backups. You can decide whether to keep them offline on hard drives or in the cloud. Either way, you will have to allocate another $100 or so for this service. Still, we recommend having your backup on a hard drive and in the cloud. It’s a bit more expensive but much more secure.

Finally, assume you will have to hire a person to deal with the maintenance of your self-hosting. Otherwise, it will truly take all of your time.

The maintenance is a nightmare

There is no better way to describe the tedious and overloading work that is server maintenance. Remember when we mentioned that you would need to consider an annual budget for service repairs and replacement parts? Well, someone has to make these repairs and switch the broken hardware with the new one. Depending on your server’s load, this can happen quite often, as servers are not like regular computers. They need to operate 24/7, which indeed takes its toll on their parts. Obviously, the server hardware is much better when it comes to quality, but still, it has a lifespan, and the more users you get, the less the lifespan will be.

Moreover, you will have to keep an eye on software updates. If you skip them, you can compromise your server’s security, or it may lead to technical issues, which will result in downtime for your website.

You must take care of security

Almost anything you do on the internet carries a risk. Even if you don’t do anything, but your computer connects to the Internet, there is a small risk of malicious attacks. However, these risks are low as no one will actually go through several billion computers hoping they will find something useful that hasn’t been protected with a password.

On the other hand, hosting an entire website (or more) makes you a prime target for dozens of hackers and other criminals. Regardless of the purpose of your website, if you are not careful, people will want to take it down or steal your or your customer’s info. If you are a retailer, this may lead to a lot of legal troubles, as almost anywhere in the world, you are liable to protect your customers’ private data. So, if you don’t know the first thing about protecting your server and website, it’s much better to leave it to the professionals.

You are the support

Finally, when you are self-hosting, there is no one to ask for help. Well, there is, but it will cost you more than what you’d pay for an entire year of hosting services. If something goes wrong at 2:00 am, there is no one to take care of it. You will have to be on call 24/7, 365 days a year. Otherwise, your website will simply disappear from the internet, significantly reducing revenues and customer flow. You will have to hire a whole team to take care of your server, as they will have to take shifts looking after your hosting. Needless to say, this will be much more expensive than the alternative.

The Alternative

If you haven’t guessed your other option, let us spell it out—regular professional hosting. Although the price is not everything, with HostArmada, you can have one incredibly fast, secure, and stable hosting service without hiring an entire team to take care of a single server. Moreover, with our products, you can choose exactly what you need for the time being and upgrade your features when your business takes some traction. HostArmada has been acknowledged as an industry leader and has also been reviewed by one of the most authoritative Web Hosting review sites – HostingAdvice. You can read more about that in their recent article about us.  So don’t waste your time finding out that self-hosting is a bad idea on your own. Contact our representatives, who will help you choose the best plan for your needs.