Hosting for a startup: shared, cloud or own server?

This question is sooner or later is asked by any startup. The answer in each case will have to be looked for independently, to evaluate the pros and cons, to estimate the risks and to consider the budget. How to understand what do you need? To begin with, a general rule: the more work the provider takes on its side, the less headache the developers will get. But you need to take into account that in addition, the startup receives a higher price and the lack of the ability to configure the system yourself. Then there are the specific nuances to each type of hosting.

Shared Hosting

The cheapest option is to host the site on php. Shared-hosting is a physical server on which isolated environments are created for the work of tens and hundreds of hosting clients. Your area of ​​responsibility is just the code. This means that you can not change almost anything in the server settings. This option is perfect for sites on standard engines, blogs, small online stores.

Cloud services

Here you collect your web service from a huge list of proposed solutions. Here we have a web server, here is the database, here is the message queue, here is the store for photos, here is the machine learning for all that, here are push-notifications for mobile - and your new unique version of Pinterest is ready.

As the consumption of resources increases, the cost of cloud services can become unreasonably high. Yes, this type of hosting allows you to start with $ 10. For a product prototype or startup with the first couple of customers price is ok. But if the project expands, then there is a risk of paying in proportion up to $ 10,000 for a couple of thousands of its customers. And it is necessary to calculate the expenses well.

Cloud services are great create a prototype, as a backend for mobile applications and other similar services. Check the ideas for the startup - test the hypothesis - with their help is also very convenient. When you need a little more control over hosting, you can use a server.

Purchase of own equipment

This is a very good option, if you really need to spend let’s say a million, in a sense, like not an operating (monthly) expenses but as capital (one-off). And you are exactly sure that:

a) you will use the purchased equipment for a longer period for which it will pay off in comparison with the lease;

b) it will have enough for the entire billing period.

Also we must remember that every few years servers become more powerful a couple of times (Moore's law is still working), while the price remains comparable. If you lease a server for several years, you can at one point abandon the current server and take a new one, for the same price, but much more powerful. If your server does not meet the requirements.