This is one.

https://www.nocix.net/dedicated/

What I can tell you, working for a company hosting data for the UK NHS.

Is that hosting is easy, I have a very reliable homelab. I keep things up to date and make sure to secure things the best I can.

But security is hard, there are many things to secure. Blind spots you didn't even know you had.

The bast way to look at security, it to start with secure and dial things back so that it works.

I think the answer depends a lot on the use case of each business's website and what the business owner/employees expect from it.

Is the website a storefront? You'll be spending a lot of time maintaining integration with payment networks and ensuring that the transaction process is secure and can't be exploited to create fake invoices or spammed with fake orders. Also probably maintaining a database of customer orders with names, emails, physical addresses, credit card info, and payment and order fulfillment records... so now you have to worry about handling and storing PII, maybe PCI DSS compliance, and you'll end up performing some accounting tasks as well due to controlling the payment processing.

Does the business have a private email server? You'll be spending a lot of time maintaining spam filters and block lists and ensuring that their email server has a good reputation with the major email service providers.

Do the employees need user logins so that they can add or edit content on the website or perform other business tasks? Now you're not just a web host, you're also a sysadmin for a small enterprise which means you'll be handling common end-user support tasks like password resets. Have fun with that.

Do they regularly upload new content? (e.g. product photos and descriptions, customer testimonies, demo videos) Now you're a database admin too.

Does the website allow the business's customers to upload information? (comments/reviews/pictures/etc, e.g. is it Web 2.0 in some way) god help you.

Exactly. It's not just downtime to worry about, either. It's disks filling up. It's hardware failure. It's DNS outages. It's random DDoS attacks. It's automated scans of the internet targeting WordPress. It's OS, php and database upgrades. It's setting up graphing, monitoring, alerting and being on-call 24/7 to deal with the issues that come up.

If these businesses are at all serious, pay for professional hosting and spend your time running the business.

Yeah, pay somebody else to be responsible for the server uptime and the bandwidth. Somebody who specializes in providing that.

As someone who's set up and managed critical business applications I would say that it's perfectly fine to host your own provided you have decent hardware that's capable of doing what you need and as a dedicated business line to provide connection.

If you try to run mission critical business applications on a home internet connection you're going to have a really bad fucking time. But hosting business critical applications on appropriate hardware and a 1Gb/s business connection with an SLA is going to meet 95-98%% of all business applications.

If something like that sounds expensive or too difficult to do then it's too expensive or too difficult for you to host yourself. Just go with a provider and sidestep self-host.

I think it's also important to consider how critical the website is. Worked for and with companies where their website being down wouldn't be a major issue and others where it would stop them being able to operate.

Self hosting websites? Easy

Self hosting something for a business? Run for the hills. It will not end well and you would be much better off with something more business standard.

There is also a scalability aspect. All companies start off small.

I would go for something more reputable like AWS or Azure.

It depends on what it is really + convenience. There are lots of morons out here running basic info sites on full beefy datacenter VMs instead of a proper cloud webhost service.

The most you'd be getting out of cloud is reliability. Self host assumes you don't have any bottlenecks (easy enough to pass), but also 99% uptime which is impossible unless you are running with site redundancy (also possible, but I doubt how many people own multiple properties with their own distribute or private cloud solution).

if 95% uptime is acceptable, and you don't live in an area with outage issues from weather, I'd say go for it. Otherwise, you can find some pretty cheap cloud solutions for basic websites. Even a cheapo VPS would probably work just fine.