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What are the advantages and disadvantages of self-hosting?

Asked 2009-04-05T21:17:37.710
11

What are the advantages and disadvantages of self-hosting something like a svn repository? All links and ideas are appreciated.

Off the top of my head:

Advantages of Self-hosting

  • Flexibility. On my own machine I can install whatever I want. If I would like to use a vcs like Bazaar and use Loggerhead instead of Trac, then right now there isn't really much choice beyond Launchpad, which has its warts
  • Save money. Costs add up over time especially for large teams
  • The free plans offered by sites like Assembla are not private. Anybody can have access to your code

Advantages of Paid hosting (ie: GitHub, Assembla, Google Code)

  • Robustness. You don't need to worry about your server catching fire because it's become somebody else's problem.
  • Less hassle. Don't need to be do all the system administration and tweaking of conf files. Instead you can just focus on the coding
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2 Answers

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With self-hosting there comes great responsibility.

  • you have to backup everything
  • you need spareparts for your hardware
  • if you have stuff that is important you need redundant hardware
  • you don't have real holidays. if something breaks you have to fix it
answered 2009-04-05T21:37:13.547
1

In addition to what others have already mentioned, there are also benefits specific to using cloud services by companies like Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, etc. Despite what some might claim, self-hosting is not inherently "safer." In most cases, it's quite the opposite actually. This is because most small-to-medium-sized companies do not have the resources to provide the level of reliability and redundancy that mega-corporations like Microsoft or Amazon can. Unless you are hosting source code for a top-secret defense project or other projects where the threat of espionage is very real, the greatest threats to your code and your business are more mundane things like server/network downtime.

  • Redundancy: Cloud services provide levels of redundancy that most businesses simply cannot obtain on their own. This includes data redundancy (back-ups/RAID), hardware redundancy (components/equipment), and geographical redundancy (multiple server locations across the globe). If a natural disaster hits your city, is your data going to be safe?
  • Multi-tenancy: Each small business by itself cannot afford 24/7 support staff and multi-million dollar equipment. But pooling their resources together through a Cloud service affords them (through centralization and better resource utilization/higher efficiency) access to a much higher level of service.
  • Security: Related to multi-tenancy, by centralizing the data of thousands of businesses, this allows security resources to be much more tightly focused.

Lastly, it should be noted that most commercial hosting providers offer co-location and dedicated hosting. And even cloud service providers allow customers to configure their "server" however they want, and installing/running whatever applications on it they want. So you can have a great deal more freedom than that offered by $10/month web hosting.

answered 2009-04-06T00:38:39.740

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