Self-hosting is a commitment. Here is the honest version.
Most vendors selling self-hosted business software pretend it is free of consequences. It is not. You become responsible for the server, the backups and the updates. This page sets out exactly what that costs you, exactly what our $9 a month takes off your plate, and the three situations where you should not choose self-hosting at all.
What changes when the software runs on your server.
| Cloud software | Gyro Suite, self-hosted | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your data physically sits | The vendor's infrastructure, in their chosen country | Your hosting account, in the country you chose |
| Who can read the database | The vendor's staff and anyone they are compelled to disclose to | You, and whoever you give access to |
| What happens when the vendor fails | Your data is inside a service that has stopped | Your installation keeps running on your server |
| Monthly cost as the team grows | Rises with every person you hire | Fixed. $9 per company, forever |
| Who patches the server | The vendor | You, or your host's managed updates |
| Who takes the backups | The vendor | The software, on a schedule, to your storage |
| Who applies software updates | The vendor, whether you want them or not | You, with one click, when you choose |
| Who fixes a broken server at 2am | The vendor's on-call team | You, or your hosting provider |
| Uptime responsibility | Theirs, with a service credit if they miss | Yours, and your host's |
The last three rows are the real cost of self-hosting, and we are not going to hide them in a footnote. Everything above them is why people accept that cost anyway.
The parts we make somebody else's problem.
Self-hosting normally means you inherit the vendor's operational work. We have spent that work up front instead, so that most of it never lands on you.
No server administration
It runs on standard shared hosting. There is no Docker, no Redis to configure, no queue supervisor to keep alive, no reverse proxy and no operating system to patch.
Updates are one click
The updater backs up first, verifies a signature, migrates in chunks that survive a shared host, and rolls back automatically if anything fails.
Backups are automatic
Scheduled database and file backups to local storage or any S3-compatible bucket, with retention, and a restore you can actually test.
Security patches are ours
We find them, we fix them, we publish the advisory, you click update. Our advisory log is public and dated.
Tax rules stay current
Country packs for tax rates, e-invoicing mandates and payroll statutory rules are updated as the law changes, inside your subscription.
Diagnostics built in
One health page tells you whether cron is running, whether mail is sending, whether backups succeeded and how much disk you have left.
Three reasons not to choose self-hosting
You have nobody who can log in to hosting. Not a developer, just somebody comfortable in cPanel who can create a database and paste a cron line. If that person does not exist and nobody wants to be them, buy cloud software instead. We will happily sell you a one-off installation, but somebody still has to own the account afterwards.
You need a guaranteed uptime figure with money behind it. Self-hosted uptime is a matter between you and your hosting provider. We cannot offer a service credit for a server we do not run.
You are past the volumes on the requirements page and unwilling to move to a VPS. Full ERP on a $3 shared plan has a ceiling. It is a high ceiling, and we publish exactly where it is, but it exists.
The four reasons that come up again and again.
The data is genuinely yours
Not in the marketing sense. In the sense that it is a MySQL database on a disk you rent, that you can dump to a file, query directly, move to another host or hand to an auditor without asking anyone's permission.
Per-seat pricing stops punishing growth
Cloud suites charge per person per month. Hire five people and your software bill rises. Here it does not move, which over three years is usually the largest single number in the comparison.
Data residency answers itself
If your regulator, your client contract or your own policy requires data to stay in a country, choose a host in that country. There is no data processing agreement to negotiate and no sub-processor list to audit.
You cannot be switched off
No price rise you did not agree to, no feature moved to a higher tier, no account suspended over a billing dispute, no service sunset with ninety days notice. The software on your server keeps working.
About self-hosting this specifically.
If it is self-hosted, why is there a monthly fee at all?
Because the work does not stop when the software is downloaded. Tax rules change every year, e-invoicing mandates arrive on their own schedule, PHP releases a new major version annually, security issues are found in every codebase eventually, and the product keeps growing. A one-off fee funds none of that, which is exactly why so much one-off-licence business software on marketplaces is abandoned two years after purchase. The subscription is what makes a five year commitment credible.
Can I audit what the software does?
You can inspect every packet it sends and every row it writes. The application code is ionCube-encoded, so you cannot read the source. That is a genuine trade-off and we would rather state it than dress it up: encoding is what makes a $9 price sustainable against copying. What you can verify independently is the network behaviour, which is a single daily HTTPS request to our licence server carrying a domain, a key and two version numbers.
What if my host does not have ionCube?
Most cPanel hosts enable it by default, and almost all of the rest will enable it on request because it is a standard cPanel extension. The requirements page has a checker that tells you in seconds, and the exact wording to send your host if it is missing. If they refuse, that is a reason to change host rather than a reason to change software, and we will tell you which hosts we have tested.
Do you offer a hosted version if I change my mind?
Not today, and it is a deliberate decision rather than a gap in the roadmap. Running a hosted service would mean holding customer data, which is the thing this product exists to avoid. If you need hosted software, we would rather point you at Odoo or Zoho than sell you something we are not set up to operate well.
Check your hosting first.
Thirty seconds, one page, a straight answer about your specific server before you spend anything.