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Ask HN: Stories of founders going back to self hosting from Shopify, Squarespace

32 points by b20000 ↗ HN
Title says it. Interested to hear from founders who went from self hosted sites e.g. on AWS to shopify/squarespace/… and then back to self hosted. I am considering stopping self hosting to focus more on content and product and getting rid of the burden of mastering html css javascript etc and maintaining servers.

14 comments

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Terretta
In a minute or two, Google won't be hosting your domains anymore anyway, it's back to Squarespace with you, like it or not!

https://www.squarespace.com/press-releases/2023/6/15/squares...

Under the terms of the agreement, Squarespace will honor all existing Google Domains customers' renewal prices for at least 12 months following the closing of the transaction, as well as provide additional incentives to encourage Google Domains customers to build a website with Squarespace and adopt other Squarespace offerings. Further, Squarespace will be leveraging Google's infrastructure powering the Google Domains product during the migration period in order to ensure the seamless transfer of domains.

Upon closing, Squarespace, a long- time reseller of Google Workspace, will become the exclusive domains provider for any customer purchasing a domain along with their Workspace subscription from Google directly for a minimum of three years. Squarespace will also provide billing and support services to Google Workspace customers that signed up for the service through Google Domains. Customers will continue to have the option to make changes to their domains account at any time.

meetingthrower
transferred mine to porkbun
oldnewthing
I tried porkbun. Really wanted it to work. Tried to transfer two domains to them from Google. For some reason, their payment system kept declining my perfectly fine Chase Visa card. It wasn't a problem with Chase. The transaction didn't even show up. There was no fraud notification etc. Gave up and moved to CloudFlare. I suspect they might need to fix payment services first.
earthling8118
I use a Chase Visa on porkbun. It works just fine.
JimtheCoder
I don't really understand your question.

If you don't want to learn HTML/CSS/Javascipt and maintain your own server, use something like Shopify. If that works, why would you go back to self hosted? You still don't know HTML/CSS and you will just burden yourself again?

A little clarification would be helpful...

nailer
I guess flexibility of an open platform versus a more limited API.

That said there’s a billion dollar cosmetics business that’s on Shopify.

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thedangler
I just use my platform for all my clients that want to use shopify. Shameless plug. Most people mine works fine and it does more than shopify does without plugins.

Most companies do not need shopify.

slurpyb
Just transitioned a client from Wordpress/WooCommerce to Shopify. Can’t believe how fast monthly costs run up, especially on their ‘app store’. I’m glad devs are being paid but jeez… i’ve spent a lot of time constructing workarounds for apps my client didn’t want to pay for, and its highly likely me and my hourly rate to code these solutions would of paid for those apps twice-over. Lol.
ezekg
> I’ve spent a lot of time constructing workarounds for apps my client didn’t want to pay for, and its highly likely me and my hourly rate to code these solutions would of paid for those apps twice-over.

I always find it funny how much money new business owners will invest in order to avoid a monthly business expense. Once you get a bit more experience, the question of build vs buy gets a bit easier.

mattmanser
They don't seem to understand that they'll be paying for this for years anyway.

I've a client I do some work on for BigCommerce. He already had a bunch of javascript on the checkout page to add warnings and notes and stuff rather than try and have a fully customized dashboard. I've added a couple more.

Most of them broke a couple of months ago after BC made some changes to the checkout. Cue me having to do some emergency fix work.

And that is why it's often better to pay for a monthly app, it's not just the functionality, it's the keeping it up-to-date.

mtnGoat
The only companies I am aware of that moved back to self hosted outgrew the Shopify platform. By that I mean, they had a large enough business with enough unique needs to justify the cost of hiring and running teams that could build the applications and support the infrastructure required to operate an e-commerce business at great scale. Generally this happens after the 7 figure mark.

Source: built a number of Shopping cart apps across multiple platforms that had 6 figure total install counts.