Choosing a Server for a Self Hosted CRM

Sep 28, 2026

The most common mistake when self hosting a CRM is buying too much server. The second most common is buying the wrong kind of cheap one. Here is how to size it honestly.

Start With the Real Numbers

A CRM for a small team is not a high traffic application. Ten people using it actively all day generate a few thousand page requests. Each request is a handful of database queries against tables measured in thousands of rows, not millions.

Clientverse is built to be light - no heavy framework, minimal dependencies - which means the practical requirement is a PHP capable server with a MySQL or MariaDB database and enough disk for your data and backups. The installation guide has the exact versions.

For most small teams that is genuinely it. You do not need four cores and 16GB of RAM to track eight hundred contacts.

When Shared Hosting Is Enough

Shared hosting works if three things are true:

1. You get PHP at a supported version and can see the error log.
2. You get a real MySQL or MariaDB database, not a row limited toy one.
3. You can install a TLS certificate, or the host does it for you.

For a freelancer or a two to five person team, a decent shared plan is a reasonable place to start. It is cheap, the provider patches the operating system, and you can move later.

The catch is control. You usually cannot run Docker, you cannot schedule arbitrary background jobs, and if you need a PHP extension the host does not enable, you are stuck. Check that before you commit, not after.

When to Move to a VPS

Move when one of these becomes true:

• You want to run Clientverse with Docker so your setup is reproducible.
• You need control over PHP versions and extensions.
• You want backups running on a schedule you define, to storage you chose.
• Shared hosting performance has become unpredictable because of the other tenants.

A small VPS - one or two virtual cores, 2GB of RAM, 40GB of disk - comfortably runs a CRM for a small team along with its database. Spend the money on faster disk before you spend it on more cores. Database work on a CRM is dominated by small random reads, and NVMe storage makes more difference than a higher clock speed.

The Specifications That Actually Matter

Disk type. NVMe or SSD. Not spinning disk, not network storage with an unclear IOPS budget.

Backup capability. Either the provider does snapshots or you have somewhere off the machine to send a nightly dump. A backup stored only on the server it came from protects you from nothing.

Location. If your customers are in the EU and you process their data under GDPR, a server in the EU removes an entire paragraph from your documentation. This is a legal convenience as much as a latency one.

A support channel that answers. When something breaks at an awkward hour, the difference between providers is not their spec sheet.

Do Not Over Provision Early

Rent small, watch the memory and disk graphs for a month, and resize when the graph tells you to. Almost every provider lets you scale a VPS up in minutes. Paying for headroom you never use is the most expensive habit in self hosting.

If sizing, patching, and backups are not how you want to spend your attention, managed hosting covers the same ground with someone else on the pager.