I found this in my email box recently and here’s what they asked me:
“Hey Lynette, I really like your newsletter. You’ve given me some great ideas. Here’s my question. Should I use scripts or pay someone every month for a hosted solution?”
As much as I don’t like telling people that, I’d have to say it depends. Firstly, I’m all for scripted solutions or software you can buy and install on your webserver. Even though sometimes the cost is high in the beginning but you get much more control over the process. Plus very often you can highly customize it. You also don’t have to be very knowledgeable about the technical aspects because you can hire someone to set everything up for you in fact I highly recommend it even if you’re technically savvy.
Another reason I’m pro scripts is because I personally belief that a small business should keep as much of its profits as possible for other important stuff like marketing (your giving yourself a paycheck) If the $50 you’re paying someone a month can go into your marketing budget instead – that would help build your business much faster.
Hosted solutions have their place. In fact blogged about this a little while back and the title of the entry was “Sometimes You WANT to pay someone monthly fees“. With hosted solutions you’ll have way less headaches. You can get set up and running very quickly sometimes minutes and if you have any trouble with the system at all, it’s not your burden. I can tell you from my experience there’s nothing like calling or emailing support and say – hey it’s down fix it and you can run off doing your own thing.
If you use a scripted solution, it becomes your problem. You’d have to fix it or hire someone to fix it. Which may or may not cost a lot of money but if you’re doing it yourself, it can take up a lot of your time – which is better spent doing something that pays you.
You also offload your risk to the solution providers and don’t have to worry about anyone trying to manipulate a security hole and inject some malicious code through your script. this can land you in very hot soup with your web host and often times in my experience webhosts shut you down immediately when they find your script is not updated properly or you neglected to plug a security flaw. Not knowing about updates on the script is no excuse.
So what’s the bottom line? Ask 10 people and you’ll get a bunch of mixed answers because there is no one answer. Whatever you choose to use will depend very much on what your business style and needs are. You’d really have to dig deep and look at what your business is doing now and where you expect it to be a little down the road If you think it has a very good potential to take off and gain customer quickly or you are at the point where your customer base is already very large, then hosted solutions work very well.
One way that can help you sort it out is, this. Try to Think of it as hiring someone to do that work for you. Compare what it will cost you to hire a developer for so many hours every month versus the cost of the hosted solution. Whichever comes out less should be the logical choice.