We have a policy that our customers are responsible for all their business-related input, but we …

Super interesting, and truly unfortunate when that happens! Just thinking about having to wait for SSL certificates like in the old days (versus Let's Encrypt) would frustrate me to no end. Forge seems like a great integrated solution (I subscribe to their newsletter and their product updates seem quite frequent and useful). What's been your experience with them? Any particular things you like, or dislike about them? I'm also curious when you talk about scaling up Forge - is that something you've done, and is that generally easy to do? Thanks a lot!

I can only sympathize here because I have those exact issues with some of our customers They don't want our hosting solutions but insist on using their own hosting partners The result are similar: - its at least five times more expensive on pure hosting costs - we lose a considerable amount of time dealing with the hosting partner (which we bill to the customer) - it's always a security nightmare, either because they put so much "safety protections" in place that it's unusable (think about the customer wanting an Internet-facing website, but the servers are private...) or because they don't put any safety settings in place so the servers are regularly taken down through awfully simple exploits (think about SSH root access with "passw0rd" as password...) - customer keep complaining about performances to us, but what can you do when the servers are sharing a 100Mbps connection, or the file…

This smells a lot like IONOS. They can put their certifications where the light doesn't shine. 10x the cost, really baaad provisioning API and bottlenecks, broken OS images, useless support...

Local hosting can make sense. Being able to drive to your provider and talk to them in person is quite valuable, and if you want to get the highest support tier from a large cloud provider you will often pay several times more compared to the same service with no support, assuming you are a large enough customer that they are willing to sell it. Cooperation with local businesses can also result in some fair amount of additional sales (sending customer to each other, buying services from each other, word of mouth, ectra), so the product cost may not represent the complete picture. Local hosting can also be comparing apple with oranges. A local data center that provide a physical machine is very different from a cloud provider, especially if that cloud is located in a different continent and under different jurisdictions. Given that they were providing SSL certificates, was this a local ph…