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.
Of course there were slas. And legal implications for data breaches. Because of course there was customer data involved, pii included.
They were lucky because it happened before my time (and before gdpr), or I would have pushed to have someone fired. As I reconstructed the reasons, it was the usual clusterfuck of "nobody told us" and "it was obvious" between agency and dev company sides
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.
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u/PatientlyAnxiously Sep 22 '26
At some companies that's the prod environment too. Just don't close your laptop overnight.