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The topic of the day is whether or not you
should choose a self-hosted or a hosted platform
for your business website. What's the difference?
A self-hosted website is one that you host on your own servers
through your web hosting company.
Essentially, you need to download the software, install it in your server,
and then you are responsible for maintaining, upgrading, and fixing your website software.
Essentially, you are the 100% owner of your website. All the responsibility falls squarely
on your shoulders. When you're going with a hosted solution,
the solution provider, the company that's selling you the service
is responsible for maintaining the software
on their servers. They do all the maintenance, they do all the upgrades and they fix any
bugs and hacks that might occur with their software. Typically what this involves is
you're paying them a monthly service for the privilege of using their solution.
Which is better for your business website? I think that really depends on two factors.
The first factor is what do you need your website to do?
There are many different solutions
out there both self-hosted as well as hosted that are fantastic products that can power
your business website. So it's important for you to sit down and understand what you want
your website to do, whether it's a hosted solution provider or whether it's open source
software that you download... whether or not that solution will do the job.
Secondly, and this is incredibly important for small businesses and solopreneurs, is
how involved do you want to get
in the day-to-day maintenance of your website?
Often it's usually not day-to-day but if you have a self-hosted website,
there's gonna be maintenance involved
and either you are gonna have to maintain your software, fix it, and deal with hacks
& malware, or you're gonna have to hire someone that will do that for you.
That's a lot of time, energy, and money that you may or may not
wanna spend or invest in the technical
nitty-gritty of maintaining a website. You might just want to focus on the core aspects
of your business. And if you're really not technologically savvy and you wanna spend
zero time maintaining your website, then a hosted solution is probably the best solution for you.
If you do like to have complete control of your website and you don't mind getting into
the technical nitty-gritty of it, then having a self-hosted solution might be a good one for you.
If you decide to go with the self-hosted software solution and you're choosing to build your
website that might be on an open-source software solution
then I recommend you choose an open-source
software solution that has a really big developer community around it
because anytime that you need to make changes to your website
or if you need to fix something or update something,
you're gonna want to be able to tap in to a big community of developers who can do the
job rather than have to search around for a small handful of folks that are qualified
to do that job and chances are you're paying them more money every time you need something changed
So that's it for today. Thanks so much for joining us. For more information about how
to build a kick-*** website visit entrepreneursforachange.com.
And see you next time. Bye!