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Ask HN: Should I self host?

1 points by wishiknew ↗ HN
I own a few websites, one of them with about 20-30 concurrent users on average, 40-60 during end of the year's peaks. It runs WP and it's hosted at WP Engine. My problem is that I feel I'm paying a lot for it. Also, I need to have a second host to handle webmail and my other domains. But my second host just updated its plans and wants me to pay twice as much to be able to host simple one-page projects I do from time to time. I feel now's the right time to gather everything in one place.

I can install a LAMP server and have a website running but I'm really not sure if I should do this by myself. My website brings some cash in and I want to maximize its uptime. What kind of emergency situations could arise once it's setup? I've seen the guides at Linode and I'm confident I can follow them. What kind of specs should I go for, too? Or is this a bad idea and I should stay on shared hosting?

Thanks for any advice!

3 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 12.4 ms ] thread
benologist
How much in total are you paying for your hosting a month under the new plans? That amount is the maximum amount of money you can save by spending days/weeks/months migrating everything to your own server and assuming near-total responsibility for your own hosting.

You'll be in a better position if you can grow your revenue instead.

wishiknew
Even if I had more revenue I would rather have a more unified hosting setup with billing occurring at one place. The situation is pretty confusing for me right now - I'm a minimalist and I like simplicity. Speaking of that, I've just realized that if I could simply get rid of WordPress, I wouldn't need such complexity. And I think this is what I must do. What kind of junk is a piece of software that requires so many engineers' work (theme designers, plugin developers and sys admins) to load at normal speeds? This is ridiculous, my site is mostly static. I've been playing with Hugo (gohugo.io) this weekend for another project and I've just realized it might be a perfect match.
benologist
Is this a company or a hobby? If it's just a hobby then have fun exploring new platforms and tools. If this is what you do instead of a full time job at someone else's company...

> Even if I had more revenue

A hard problem you will suck at most of the time.

> I would rather have ...

A fun distraction that you can easily, and enjoyably, work on forever. When you finish you can just invent new technical challenges for yourself.

> The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.

http://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html