I have a shared hosting account that costs about $100 a year. It provides every php version, almost unlimited projects, hundreds of megabytes of storage space per project, domain registration, forwarding, mirroring, traffic spike protection, other security precautions and file scanning, backups, mysql and other database, free SSL certificates, etc. But I can only use PHP on it and it’s shared hosting so I can’t just run anything I want on it.
I have a project that is built with vue.js and it’s SEO is non-existent. I assume I need to do server side rendering to improve that. But to do that it seems I’d need a server where I am in 100% control of everything. It seems there are 2 options for that. One is “managed” where all responsibility for security and configuration is handled by the hosting company and costs far more per month than I or the client can afford. The other requires me to take on 100% of the responsibility and I know I will waste countless hours of my life trying to manage the server and still fail to prevent being hacked or something. In addition to this, the work load would be even heavier if I tried to migrate everything the shared hosting account does for me over to my totally self-managed server in an effort to save money. I can’t afford the shared hosting account and the additional expense of either a managed or unmanaged private server account.
I’m stuck and don’t know what to do about this. This is actually a problem that’s had me stuck for a couple of years. On the one hand I’m not charging the client anything but on the other hand I still feel bad that I haven’t done anything on this project for a very very long time because I can’t decide what to do.
Someone asked me if I’d like to take over a small project that was done in python but never launched and it would be kind of the same situation with that. I could redo it in php and host it for them in my existing shared hosting account for nothing or they could pay more than they would like to pay for a server where we could actually run python. Or pay signficantly more than that for a managed server where experts actually do the technical work to keep it online and unhacked.
Being stuck not knowing what to do here is a big part of why I haven’t written a line of code in almost 3 years.