Welcome to Smuggle Me

I’ve talked to a number of people recently about hosting their website at home or on their own server in a data center. I personally think that doing so is a pretty big mistake. I think that getting a shared host is the best option for 90% of consumers. In fact, most businesses wouldn’t need more than a shared hosting service like Hosting Zoom either.

Here are a couple reasons you might think about when deciding to use a shared hosting service or not:

High Availability
A shared host often uses clustered failover to handle the failure of the server. If you have your own server your more than likely don’t have this level of reliability. If you do have clustered failover then you should stop reading this blog post altogether. It’s not designed for you.

Improved Performance
In a shared host environment they have designed these servers to handle high volumes of traffic. Their netowrk pipe is designed to handle large amounts of traffic.

Patching the Server
Patching and securing a server is not a trivial thing. Let them take care of that while you just take care of driving more traffic to your website.

Much more could be said, but that’s a start.

Hosting Zoom is an example of a company that’s using this clustered failover hosting technology. Pricing starts at $7.95/mo. It still amazes me how low such a robust technology costs these days. For that price all website data including email, web, and databases are mirrored in real time and in the event of a server failure our system will route all traffic to the available server within the cluster keeping your website online until the problem is resolved.

Why then did you want to host your own server?