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Vicente G. Reyes
Vicente G. Reyes

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For Freelancer Developers/Web Design Companies, do you outsource your hosting or do you use your own Infrastructure?

I'm a very ambitious person but I know I'm a still pup surrounded by Great White Sharks and Megalodons so I need your help.

It's been 2 weeks since I've sent my first proposal to friends' for web design, hosting, management & dev but everyday after I've sent them, I've been very skeptic about the hosting price I've designed for my service.

Before I've sent those.. I first...

Sent out applications to be an affiliate for hosting companies but was only accepted by two, which I think is still awesome and is a reliable & growing hosting company. Do you think I should just outsource hosting with BlueHost which charges $x.xx/month for the Shared Hosting, Hostinger which charges $x.xx/month or should I go for the AWS Lightsail Linux/Unix server at $x.xx/month?

Another idea I've got from learning on Udemy is to use a LAMP Server, but as of writing, I think this would be feasible for corporations, not Small Companies. Any idea what the forecasted cost would be on a website with 1000 monthly visitors?

I just want to get a different perspective/opinion on these so won't I zoom in too much on the details of each plan.

Hoping for any thoughts and ideas!

Cheers! 🍺

Top comments (6)

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I would definitely outsource—have you looked into Netlify?

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highcenburg profile image
Vicente G. Reyes

I have! But their plans are a little confusing.

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cjbrooks12 profile image
Casey Brooks

Their plans are really focused around "add-ons" to their core service of hosting static files on a super-fast and reliable CDN, which is free. You won't be able to host a full backend server like Wordpress, but you'll only be doing yourself and your clients/friends a favor by getting into JAMStack applications rather than the traditional fullstack webservers, and Netlify is the one-stop-shop for just about everything JAMStack.

This article on Smashing Magazine, written by Netlify's co-founder and CEO, is a great introduction to the world of static site generators. And from there, StaticGen.com is the best listing of all SSGs available today.

In addition, I've been developing a new SSG, Orchid, for several years now and am very deep in this space and would love to answer any other questions you may have about SSGs or the JAMStack and give personal recommendations for related tools and services.

I just love the JAMStack, and I would highly encourage you to give it a try!

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highcenburg profile image
Vicente G. Reyes

ha! Thanks! These would help me big time!

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turnerj profile image
James Turner

It really depends if you want to be a hosting company or not. If your goal is to do website design/development, I'd try and just push a client to a specific hosting company that you know will suit the needs of what you're building (eg. Node, Python, PHP etc).

Either being the hosting company through providing your own infrastructure or just being a middleman to outsourced hosting have their drawbacks. You'll effectively become responsible for uptime and any issues that result in the hosting of the service. It also inadvertently "locks" the client into your hosting because you developed it. That might sound good for you but I've found that lack of separation more of an issue than a benefit.

What I do is provide a recommendation of a hosting company that would work and get the client to sign-up directly to that.

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highcenburg profile image
Vicente G. Reyes

Alright. I think I know what to do now. Thanks!