Year 1 Hosting Strategy

Get Your Business Online
Without the Cloud Bill

You're starting a business from home. You need a website with a contact form, not an AWS architecture diagram. Learn to self-host affordably while you focus on what matters — growing your business.

The Year 1 Philosophy

Honest, pragmatic hosting for businesses that are just getting started

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Home Office Reality

You work from home. Your server can live there too. No pretence about enterprise infrastructure — just functional hosting for a business of one.

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Gmail Handles Email

Use [email protected] — it's free, reliable, and you're not running an email server. Focus on what actually needs hosting: your website.

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Zero Recurring Costs

Hardware you own, electricity you're paying anyway, free management tools. No £30/month GoDaddy bill, no cloud compute charges.

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Learn the Fundamentals

DNS, SSL, Linux, networking — you'll understand it properly because you have to. These skills transfer when you're ready to scale.

Risk vs Cost — The Honest Assessment

Not everything needs five nines of uptime

Risk Actual Impact Enterprise Mitigation Year 1 Reality
Power cut Site down for hours UPS, diesel generator (£500-5000+) Gmail still works. Call them tomorrow. £0
Broadband outage Site unreachable Redundant ISP, 4G failover (£100+/month) You're not Amazon. A few hours offline won't sink you. £0
Hardware failure Rebuild required Hot standby, RAID arrays (£1000+) Offsite backups, rebuild over the weekend. £0
Security breach Data compromise WAF, SOC team, penetration testing No CMS = no admin panel to attack. Static site, minimal surface. £0

Why We Don't Use WordPress

Bandwidth is precious on a home connection. Bots are relentless.

🚫 Popular CMS (WordPress, Joomla)

  • Constant bot traffic hitting /wp-admin, /wp-login.php
  • Brute force attempts 24/7 consuming bandwidth
  • Requires constant patching and plugin updates
  • Database = SQL injection target
  • You become a target simply by using recognisable software

✓ Static or Lightweight Custom

  • Bots scan, find nothing to exploit, move on
  • Minimal bandwidth footprint
  • No admin panel to attack
  • No database to inject
  • Use AI to generate exactly what you need

The AI approach: Use AI to research your market, then use AI to generate a clean, fast website that does exactly what you need — contact form, about page, services. You'll understand what you've got because you built it.

Tutorial Roadmap

From domain purchase to live website — practical guides for self-hosting

1

The Year 1 Hosting Strategy

Philosophy, why not cloud, what you actually need, risk assessment framework

Coming Soon
2

Domain Name Procurement

Registrars compared, what to look for, avoiding upsells and gotchas

Coming Soon
3

DNS Fundamentals

A records, CNAMEs, propagation, Cloudflare as free DNS and CDN

Coming Soon
4

Hestia Control Panel Setup

Free server management — installation, configuration, why Hestia over cPanel

Coming Soon
5

Let's Encrypt SSL

Free HTTPS, auto-renewal, no excuse for HTTP anymore

Coming Soon
6

Subdomain Strategy

crm.yourbusiness.com, assets.yourbusiness.com — organising your services

Coming Soon
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AI-Generated Websites

Using AI to create clean, fast, secure sites — better than any page builder

Coming Soon
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Self-Hosted Business Apps

CRM, invoicing, asset management — free tools on your own infrastructure

Coming Soon

Free Tools We Use

No license fees, no subscriptions — just functional software

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Hestia CP

Full-featured control panel for web, mail, DNS, and databases

Free & Open Source
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Let's Encrypt

Free SSL certificates with automatic renewal

Free Forever
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Cloudflare

Free DNS, CDN, and DDoS protection

Free Tier
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EspoCRM

Self-hosted CRM for tracking leads and customers

Free & Open Source

Ready to Take Control?

Follow along as we build real infrastructure for real businesses — no cloud bills, no enterprise complexity.

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