Here is a dilemma for a startup project willing to save extra at the inception phase: to host by own efforts or lean back on a hosting provider? When you host your eCommerce website on your own, you don’t pay a third-party for hosting. That’s obvious. But, does it mean you really save adding more value to your business? Who hits the jackpot and who loses while keeping and maintaining its own server independently? This article sheds the light on the website hosting expenditures to include in your accounting book.
Managing a web server: work share
Managing a web server is a specific job. A business owner can keep and maintain a server independently without reverting to third-parties. But unless you like all about tinkering around with computers or hand-picking up applications, it is more time- and cost-effective solution to ask an expert.
Suppose, you don’t want to administer server yourself, but would like to use an in-house developer. In that case, you bear an extra expense for keeping an IT specialist in your staff, but that’s is a half-truth. A more critical expenditure you take here is technical debt – the cost you pay extra for the additional work to rectify a workaround made by an all-in-one specialist for a show.
IT specialists include system administrators – those guys who set up the software, databases, server environment, and the developers – the specialists who deal with the code. One cannot be an expert in everything. If somebody does somebody else’s job, it is more likely that he or she will screw something up.
What if you decided to set up and maintain a server on your own?
It’s also feasible. By doing so, consider the following inevitable expenditures:
- Server acquisition costs;
- Email software costs;
- Server maintenance with an experienced system administrator;
Apart from material expenditures, make sure you possess an adequate amount of time and skills with the in-house team/expert to ensure:
- server security and PCI DSS compliance;
- regular software updates, backups, and improvements;
- 24/7 monitoring of server operation and stable performance.
A dedicated IT specialist is required to keep an eye on all the above activities and take the appropriate measures when needed. It is expensive and time-consuming. At the same time, combining system administrator and developer in one and the same IT specialist is even more costly and insecure as you entrust monitoring server issues to a generalist who can ruin your business taking an unprofessional approach. For a small business, self-hosting even with an in-house administrator can take too many resources that it could spend on development and growth. Until you get more daily visitors, more annual sales, or more employees (for operational efficiencies), managing servers on your own will add charges to the cost of the business development.
Hosting with a Dedicated Hosting Provider
When you hire a dedicated IT team you get the skills and knowledge that have been already examined and trusted by other businesses. A dedicated provider is focused on professional hosting service providing. Instead of facing problems with the growing number of requests, an overwhelmed system administrator or server non-optimal infrastructure, think about outsourcing a dedicated hosting company. Their work is already included in a hosting plan together with all other charges: server acquisition, email accounts, software maintenance (updates, backups, improvement), and other related costs.
Closing
At Simtech Development, we’ve got a dedicated SRE/DevOps team whose job is to deal with all the Сloud hosting issues. They take a lot of care of the existing and potential problems with the web project operation and performance, analyze and optimize its infrastructure, provide technical support with round-the-clock monitoring and SLA commitment.
You can trust the practical experience of our team in optimizing and serving the projects under high loads. Their portfolio includes successful dealing with multiple web applications and frameworks, working on most operating systems, transferring web projects to new platforms, servers and data centers. Moreover, hosting with Simtech Development hosting team, you can scale your business while it grows by choosing a convenient hosting plan.