I run my own servers for thirty client websites. Here's what that actually involves
Why a freelance web designer hosts client sites on his own infrastructure instead of renting from a big host, and what it takes to keep thirty sites answering in under 50ms.
2 min readMichael Overton
Most web designers build your site and then hand you a login to GoDaddy or Wix and wish you luck. I don't. The sites I build run on servers I set up and look after myself. People sometimes ask why I'd take that on, so this is the long answer.
The setup
Eight servers, at Hetzner and DigitalOcean, running around thirty WordPress and WooCommerce sites between them. Each site lives in its own containers: nginx out front, PHP behind it, its own database, Redis for caching. Nothing shares a database with anything else. If one site has a bad day, its neighbours don't notice.
In front of all that: a firewall, a web application firewall, server level caching, automatic certificates, and monitoring that checks every site from the outside every minute.
Why bother
Three reasons, and they're all about control.
Speed. Because I control the whole stack, pages are served from cache at the server, not assembled on every visit. The end to end response time across the sites I host is under 50 milliseconds. Google suggests aiming for under 800. It's not magic, it's just nobody in between me and the machine.
Security. When a WordPress vulnerability drops, I don't wait for a hosting company to roll out a patch across a million customers. I update my thirty sites that evening. Spam filtering, two factor login and hardening are on by default, not an add on.
Accountability. If something goes wrong with your site, there's one person to call, and it's the person who built it. No support ticket, no call centre, no "that's a hosting issue, not a design issue".
What it involves day to day
Less than you'd think, because the boring parts are automated. Backups run every night at three. Certificates renew themselves. Updates are tested, then applied. Monitoring tells me before a client does.
What it does involve is paying attention. I read the security notices. I watch the graphs. When a server's getting busy, I move things around before it matters. It's gardening more than firefighting.
What it costs you
Hosting with me starts from £150 a year, email included. You're never locked in. You can host anywhere you like and I'll still build your site. But most people, once they've seen the difference, stay.
The question I'd ask a host
If you're choosing hosting for a business site, ask one thing: who do I actually talk to when it breaks? If the answer is a chat window and a queue, that's the price you're really paying.
If you'd rather the answer was "Mike", you know where I am.
