There may come a time where you consider hosting your learning product yourself, rather than hosting them with Plume.
And while technically you can self-host your LMS or learning app, there are some drawbacks that you should consider before making your final decision.
Firstly let’s look at the main reason why you should move away…
Some of our clients have grown at such an impressive rate that they need a dedicated team to manage a highly-scalable hosting environment. These servers might be hosted with Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud and managed by a highly-specialised external devops team.
The cost of these kinds of management services typically start in the low thousands of pounds and the server costs roughly the same, so these kinds of services are reserved for high-growth products. In these cases, a move from Plume’s hosting services makes absolute sense and we’re fully behind the transition.
Years ago when we didn’t offer hosting, we constantly ran into the limitations imposed on us by external hosts. Perhaps a plugin or component stopped working due to compatibility issues, for example.
These limitations often required fixes or workarounds that took a significant chunk of our client’s support budgets and frustrated users while we found a fix. And this prevented us from making more meaningful improvements to our client’s teck tech.
The truth is that we only host to make our client’s and our developer’s lives easier. And if you decide to host it yourself, we will certainly run into difficulties that cost both energy and money to resolve.
We’ve developed processes and implemented technologies that allow us to efficiently and effectively deliver our best work.
When you switch up the hosting environment, many of these processes will no longer function, and the tools we need may not be available. This means developing new processes, finding new tools, and re-training our team - all at cost to you.
In some cases, workarounds are so finicky that they just slow down the overall development velocity, so that everything takes longer and costs more to achieve.
Naturally, we have full access to our own servers. When something goes wrong (touch wood), we have sufficient knowledge and tools to bring your site up in no time.
When you host yourself, if your server goes down, we’re at the liberty of your host’s support desk. When this happens, we often have limited access to the server which makes finding and fixing critical issues slow, potentially resulting in hours or days of downtime.
The truth is that hosting accounts for less than 1% of Plume’s revenue. It is not a service that we offer as a revenue driver, but rather offer out of a need to make our client’s and our developer’s lives easier, and to help us to deliver our best work.
Now you know the risks associated with self-hosting, the final decision is up to you.