Picking a hosting setup you will not regret in two years
Managed hosting, a VPS, or something serverless. The right answer depends on one question: who is on call when it breaks at 2am?
Hosting decisions get made early, under time pressure, and then quietly determine everything about how you work for the next few years. Here is how we think about it.
The one question that matters
Who fixes it when it falls over at 2am? If the answer is “nobody”, buy managed hosting and pay the premium gladly. If you have somebody who knows the stack, a VPS with a proper deploy pipeline is cheaper and more flexible.
Two traps worth naming
The first is uploading files into the deployment directory. Plenty of shared hosts replace that directory on every deploy, which means every image an editor uploaded disappears. Uploaded media belongs on a persistent path outside the release, or in object storage.
The second is calling the current setup “temporary” for three years. Whatever you ship is production. Treat it that way or migrate deliberately, with a date.
A checklist we use
- Automated database backups, tested by restoring one.
- Media stored outside the deployment directory.
- Staging that mirrors production closely enough to trust.
- One deploy command, documented in the repository.
- Uptime monitoring with a human on the other end.