Ask HN: Do you host client's websites on your own server, or on shared hosting?
Hey all,
I'm just getting into the wide world of freelancing and am wondering what the best approach is for hosting client's websites. I've been very strongly advised by the lead developer at my company to stay away from hosting client sites on my own vps and to just use shared hosting. His rationale is that there is less maintenance time involved, less client time involved, and you benefit from the host's security instead of having to make sure yours is up to par. On the other hand, hosting on your own server gives you control over the environment, and if you need to change anything then it's much easier than on a shared host. What approach do you recommend taking? Currently hosting 20-30 client sites on a single Linode VPS. Mixture of Wordpress and static websites. Nice to have the full control, and the ability to SSH in and work out any problems instantly. Any overhead is reduced by some good bash aliases, for creating apache domain confs, and things like that. edit: gist of my commands here - https://gist.github.com/omgmog/7155850