- Published on
3 Reasons to Host Small
- Authors
- Name
- Alex Lee
- Title
- CEO
- @alexjoelee
Hosting Small
There are over 300,000 web hosting providers in the world - you don't have to use one of the big three hyperscalers! In this article I want to help convince you to consider trying smaller cloud providers.
I think lots of developers don't necessarily know that there is excellent (often closed-source) software out there for hosting businesses that want to be able to provide high-quality VPS, shared hosting, and even serverless-style services. Don't worry about the UX side anymore. Starting a cloud hosting company used to be hard because you had to create the web app yourself. Now you don't have to, so entrepreneurial system administrators have been taking advantage and starting excellent hosting companies on their own.
Pricing
It's not always the case, but often, smaller hosting providers are actually able to provide a lower price. Smaller providers rarely have corporate overhead or tons of staff. Larger hosting providers seem to have higher prices and charge for more separate items (e.g. charging separately for individual requests and metered bandwidth).
Deals & Partnerships
Smaller providers can offer a lower price, and always seem to have better long-term deals, too. Monthly or annual cloud subscriptions can yield huge discounts. If you reach out to these providers via e-mail and ask to strike a deal or to start a partnership, they're often much more receptive and excited. Look out for holiday discounts and short-term sales as smaller hosting providers will regulary run special discounts.
Support
This is the big one. With the smaller providers, you know right away if they're worth it or not by their support. I've been surprised by the quick and transparent response of smaller hosting providers, who will often offer up the technical reasons for the outage or issue right away. One provider I work with also runs a Discord server and will provide specific steps they're taking to fix issues in realtime. There's no guessing, no waiting for some anonymous status page to update, and no canned response boilerplate b*llsh!t. There's also usually no SLA credits, so if that's something you're looking for, stick with your hyperscalers, I guess.