The performance of my larger sites left a lot to be desired, and the costs are running up considerably. I had over 10 sites running, all with the same provider and the costs per site vary between 185 Euros per year and 65 Euros per year. For the large sites I have 5GB storage and the smallest is 200MB.
HOMESERVER: Previously I hosted a few websites from home, on a Zyxel NAS with a cheap domain provider. That all worked fine then. Based on my previous experience I have bought a Synology DS718+ web server, a few fast SSDs with mirroring in it and up to RAM. The cost is about 800 Euro. As a backup I have a DS218 play with a couple of big harddisks in it and extra RAM as a normal local NAS with an extra mirrored wordpress server for emergencies and maintenance on the main server.
So now you see this post from my home server.
My experience is that it is always better to be the only one on your own web server than to rent shared hosting, regardless of the so-called SSD hosting et cetera. That’s what larger companies do as well: Just a fat server on a fast internet connection.
Just to be sure, I do have a backup (UPS) with battery for the 230 Volt power to the internet modem/router and web servers, and a data connection backup via a mobile connection, in case the internet connection goes down. The autonomy of the UPS is about 6 hours.
And… whether I like it? Actually, I’m mostly very happy with the merging of my various sites into 1 overall site because of its clarity. Because of my diversity of interests I had just too many sites running which resulted in insufficient attention on the sites. Now that I only have one for my hobbies and one for my business everything has become much simpler.
And how to proceed? I will cancel my webhosting and I have to see which domains I want to keep. That also depends a bit on the costs. If only the costs of the domains are not too high, I can keep 6 or so. Which I then redirect (fixed, 302) to my home server. Eventually only 1 domain will remain, but which one should that be…? And then I can make my URL unambiguous again!
That’s it!