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?
If you’re in Canada, Rogers (nee Shaw) and Telus small business plans both offer ‘static’ IPs (Shaw’s residential plans aren’t officially static, but they rarely change on a residential modem unless you are always switching out hardware). Telus business fibre 1GB plan offers up to 5 static IP addresses.
Then you must purchase one or more domain names and assign them to your IP address… depending on your business’s needs even small consumer hardware can run a web server just fine.
Have a backup strategy though! And be sure you actually test the restore procedure on a periodic basis!
Linux backups can range from home-grown ‘rsync’ scripts and hot-plug external drives as backup, to more fancy ‘Time Machine’ like backup things (I honestly forget what’s out there for Linux right now, I have my own rsync scripts to back up to external drives).
My home server is my own, but if money is on the line you want proper backup and failover even. Most Linux distributions are easy-peasy to set up with Apache or nginx web servers but if you’ve never set those up you’ll need to study lots of tutorials and manual pages.
If you don’t want to tend to security and backups yourself though, it might be best to find a hosting service.