For most small businesses, SaaS wins: no servers, no updates, no backups to think about. A hosting company is not most small businesses. You already run servers, you already take backups, and your clients already trust you with their sites. The question is narrower: should the system that bills them live on your infrastructure or someone else's?
What SaaS buys you
- Nothing to install or update.
- Someone else's on-call rotation.
- Usually a faster first day.
What self-hosting buys you
- Your client data, card tokens and invoices stay on your servers, under your jurisdiction.
- No per-client fees that scale against you; a licence by client count instead.
- The same backup, monitoring and restore procedures you already have.
- Private network access to your control panels, instead of opening WHM to the internet for a vendor's IP range.
- Customisation and integrations that do not wait for a vendor roadmap.
The cost that is usually hidden
Self-hosting is only cheaper if updating is easy. A platform that needs an SSH session, a git pull and a prayer on every release will be left on an old version, and old versions are where security problems live. Look for one-click updates from inside the admin, release notes that tell you what changed, and a rollback path.
A reasonable middle
Hostinvo is self-hosted by design: a one-line installer on a Linux VPS with Docker, a licence instead of a per-client fee, one-click updates from Utilities > Update Hostinvo, and What's New inside the workspace after each release. Your data never leaves your server; what you buy from us is the software and its updates.