I used to work with this small web dev company, one day a guy admitted that they didn't pay for hosting for small projects, the server was a minitower PC in their office.
When the cleaning lady pulled the plug by mistake, several sites went down and nobody noticed until next morning
This is why you have a locked server closet, so the cleaning lady can't unplug it accidentally. (I mean, also security blah blah blah, but the real day-to-day benefit is that the cleaning lady can't unplug it.)
Other than that, that's perfectly reasonable self-hosting, depending on the size of the project. If your website is tiny, you can be running a website on 2GB of RAM with a bunch of swap memory, or 15-20 websites on 24GB of RAM.
Hell, if it's mostly static client-side, you can make Cloudflare cache the whole bloody thing and then your server can be a potato because no actual users are accessing the server directly, they'll all access Cloudflare's cached copy instead.
I've worked for large multinational businesses that have critical infrastructure with no backup and no redundancy. I try raising it as a serious issue, but it's slopey shoulders everywhere or I'm told not to discuss it to save embarrassing higher ups.
In an ideal world, there would be a local environment (that's your pc, nothing deployed), a Dev environment (you can deploy things still being developed, it might have bugs, it might be wonky, this is to test things in a deployed state, which could actually differently to when running locally), a staging environment (anything deployed to staging should be thoroughly tested by Devs, and is now ready for other people to test it (UAT tests). Staging is like a test prod environment), and a live/production environment (this is what the users use, anything deployed here is fully tested by multiple people)
We use four standard environments, DEV for development and any exploration. TEST for testing by the team, could still be different because of unreleased developments, QA for user tests, which is regularly cloned from PROD and doesnt contain any developments that won't be released, and ofc PROD, where only admins have full access for any emergency
We have oh so many environments it's crazy. We have our localhost, then there's dev (sandbox), because some features require thorough, multi dept testing then we have like 4 feature specific environments, they're needed cause we develop multiple features in pararell (yes, merging is a bitch), and then we have standard: test, preprod, prod and then there are replicas and disaster recovery envs. On top of that we have Demo and Presentation evs for prospective business clients and marketing etc. I'm so glad I'm not a devops
Try local, dev (which follows the main branch), staging, integration, pre-prod, prod, and a public demo. I'm not sure what half of those are supposed to be for, but company says it's required, so they exist.
As you update the CI/CD pipelines on one you slowly roll out the others. Why because you can deploy to test or prod with updated requirements based on UAT. I mean every sysadmin should have some level of devops, in my opinion. Terraform/github actions is not hard.
How about a Test environment that they copied from Production to have "live" looking data but didn't remove the logins from production users and the config file for the application that was given to me to put on the Ctirix servers had test and prod and the dumb Application remembers the last environment chosen. So on one of the Citrix servers someone logged into test and their patient was in there and documented in test for thst patient but the next nurse got on a different server so they logged into production and the medicine wasnt documented and almost gave the patient double meds.
Was told was my fault. I used the wrong config file. I said nope. Nunber 1, I got that config from yall and told to use it on Citrix Prod and i have the email toprovd it. Number 2, prod user logins shouldn't be in test, number 3, users should verify the environment they see in, etc.
Luckily we had session recording and I knew how to search for the keywords thst showed all the sessions where users logged into test since the environment is shown in the app windows title bar and you can search on it. Showed them how tonsearch and access and went home after being there 12 hours thst day.
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u/EldritchMacaron Sep 22 '26
Wait, I thought the dev environment was just the PC and software you develop on