[Tim Hensel]

Hi there. With my current hosting company, I am currently paying roughly $90 a month for a hybrid VPS, and the hosting company has good support and can update the sever when needed, etc. But this comes out to over $1k per year for hosting.

With my own home internet server provider, I currently have 75Mbps UP/75Mbps DOWN internet speeds and can upgrade if needed to 150/150 or higher. So for having a sever at home now speed-wise is possible for me... but I know (right now at least) very little on setting up a home web server so I do not know if this would be worth it (to save $1k+ per year).

Is anyone here running their own server at home with CS-Cart running?
And is it a time consuming process to run/maintain a home server?


Thank you very much for your thoughts!

-Tim

[The Tool]

I looked into it about a year ago but just the cost of business internet (you need a static IP) was about $350 a month. If you want cPanel, that will be another chunk of change. Cheaper to stick with a host.

[tbirnseth]

If you're not an experienced system administrator, you will chew up many hours doing your own support by trial and error. Your vps cost seems a bit high. You should be able to find for about $60/month or so.

[P-Pharma]

If the site does not need to be online always and if you enjoy putting in a lot of hours and learning about hosting then its a possibility.
But don't do it to save money. That only becomes interesting if you have high speed fibre and you spend 5-6 digits in hosting.
My first site was self hosted. But that was back when it was already amazing if website pages loaded within a few minutes. Long time ago.

[clips]

We used to host our sites on our own servers. Keeping them up to date is crazy. We learned quickly that until we reach a high enough level it is absolutely not beneficial to self host. Right now we have a dedicated server and then we host some sites on shared hosting packages. We never had very good luck with a VPS. CS-Cart constantly had problems with the VPS packages...no matter what host we were with.

[tbirnseth]

I and many others have had great success with VPS'. Must be Jim!

Of course, they need to be configured properly. Bottom end is usually not the right config but 4+GB memory and SSD drives with 20+GB of storage should be fine. CPU is much less of an issue these days and cs-cart is usually I/O bound rather than CPU bound due to its high DB demand..

[Tim Hensel]

Thanks everyone for your convincing thoughts!

One thing, I really do hate switching hosts (transferring everything over, getting the settings right on the new host, etc) ... and with all of your thoughts then let it be written on a stone table - "I will be sticking with my current Hybrid VPS."

[tbirnseth]

Costs vary widely. But I would think of the cost (hosting + cart + maintenance + extensions) as being compared to storefront rent for a Brick-n-Mortar business. You will still come in at 1/10 what it would cost to run a BnM business.