Why it’s a bad Idea to host your WP site locally
Hello there! (Insert explanation as to why I’ve been missing)
So something a client requested was the ability to self host a WordPress site on his local computer. Initially, this sounded like a great challenge to tackle. In theory, no monthly, annual, or cycle costs and renewal costs. Plus you get to be in total control of your server. But after researching it a bit, I learned that it is alot more dangerous than what what it is. I truly can’t imagine wanting to do this unless you need physical access to the drives in the event of a police raid or something…but then, bruh. What do you need to hide? UH?!
Let’s explore the different scenarios:
- You’re legally responsible for all security issues/ attacks etc..
- You’ll be investing the time to maintain whatever stack you end up on, and then when you don’t patch it and it gets exploited, who KNOWS what’s on your machine at that point
- Long term maintenance costs and liability issues
- It’s almost definitely gonna be way slower than even mid-range shared hosting
- Your electricity cost / effort costs / annoyance
- What happens if there’s a power cut? Internet goes down?
- No redundancy in a basic setup! Once you add that you’ve more than blown away any potential cost savings
- A cat could ruin the whole set-up with an errant cup of coffee
- Everything could be highly flammable … which is why we have server rooms that prohibit food and beverages and remain at a set temperature constantly
- You would need a really good UPS which ends up costing as much as it would to host in a dedicated company for a few years.
I think there’s good reasons to self-host things, especially if outages are expected and built into the architecture. There’s some decentralized networking apps that would be great to self-host easily on their own hardware, but nothing where there’s an expectation of connectivity should be running off somebody else’s personal computer.
Power outages and cats aside, running a server that is connected to the internet is really not something you should do unless you really know what you are doing. WordPress is a HUGE target for hackers. Unless you keep the server up-to-date and have some general awareness of security best practices and keep an eye out for new vulnerabilities, it is going to get hacked.
If money is the problem there’s really great hosting companies out there with great rates that will give you a bang for your buck. Fast Commet has been one I’ve really enjoyed. Their introduction rate stays the same even when you renew, unlike Hostgator (also my favorite and possibly one of the best one I have used ) which do have a low intro rate when you sign up but at the renewal they charge you double the price.
