A cheap server isstill a full-time job.
A VPS for a few euros a month can run a website and its mail. Setup takes an afternoon. The invoice does not show the on-call job that starts the day it is up.
What you get
The whole stack is yours, down to the kernel. Nothing is rented except the metal.
No per-seat pricing. Ten mailboxes cost the same as one.
You know exactly where the machine is, because you chose it.
What it costs
You are the on-call engineer. The 03:00 bounce, the failed certificate, the full disk: all of them are yours.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC are things you configure, rotate, and monitor, with no one to check your work.
IP reputation is earned slowly and lost in a week of misconfiguration. There is no support line to call when it is gone.
Backups, patching, and failover exist only to the extent that you built them.
Where we differ
The machine is provisioned, hardened, and patched on a schedule you are told about in advance.
We work to 99.9% availability and publish what we measure on the status page. It is not a contractual guarantee and there are no automatic credits, but if an outage costs you something, customers or time, tell us and we make it right with you.
A named person is on call, and the status page publishes whether they are reachable.
| Pick them when | Pick us when |
|---|---|
| You enjoy the work and want to learn the stack from the inside. | The mail has to arrive and the site has to be up while you do the actual business. |
| The workload is a project the business can live without for a day. | You would rather buy the outcome than own the pager. |
| You already have a senior sysadmin whose time is not being spent on this. |
Not sure which one you are?
Open a brief and say what you have today. If the honest answer is that nothing should change, that is a valid result. You will get it in writing.