I think it kinda depends on a number of factors.
Firstly, how mission critical is your site?
Secondly, how many sites will you be running?
Thirdly, how much server expertise do you have at your organization?

I run a hosting company with servers designed from the ground up to host C5 websites. It took considerable time to come up with my "perfect setup" and I think it may still need refining in the future. However, the effort has been worth it, as I can now offer extremely high availability SLA's for enterprise users. If you need that level of availability, then I would always recommend outsourcing to a company who understands how high availability works, and how it works in relation to C5.

At the other end of the scale, if you are just running one small website, where 100% uptime isn't critical, then again, outsource at a low cost - it's just not worth the effort!

But then there is the area in between these, where hosting your own can really pay dividends. If you need to run multiple sites and want to have control over your C5 environment and learn about how it works well, then get yourself a virtual cloud server and start having some fun :)

If you decide to host your own setup, give me a shout and I'll point you in the right direction as far as basic setup is concerned :)

Jon

You don't need to sell me on hosting and SLAs. Using a hosting service is a great idea. We are probably (90% likely) going to have someone host our site. But I'm just trying to provide some unbiased stats to my supervisor regarding what people using C5 generally do.

I've found that it's no different than any other PHP-based CMS. In fact, in some ways it's easier because updating the system is a better process (because of the override system where changes to functionality happen outside of the core system folder, so replacing that folder doesn't make you lose all of your customizations).

Like jbx said, your needs will vary depending on the level of traffic to these sites, but the evaluation process is no different for C5 than for any other website.

As for me personally, I've hosted sites on my own VPS (Slicehost), as well as deploying to some of the cheap shared hosts (godaddy, dreamhost, siteground, bluehost/hostmonster, etc.), and not really had any problems. I did notice a considerable improvement in loading times when I installed the APC cache on my own server, so if you're going with someone else I would definitely find one that says they have APC cache enabled on all of their servers.

Best of luck.

-Jordan

I have used C5 across several sites and have used both hosting providers and my own servers.

There is not much to what is needed to run C5 on your own servers. The biggest thing is make sure that you have it secured. Often this is overlooked when running your own web server. A LAMP server is easy to setup and maintain, but but the default settings are rarely secure enough for production.

Depending what Distro you or running or if you are running it on top of windows you can make sure that critical updates are taken care of.

Honestly I have had more issues on hosting providers, although generally due to practices they have to undertake to manage many sites on a server.

If I go the hosting provider route I generally go Managed VPS. This way you get kind of the best of both worlds. The server is still yours, but the maintenance is taken care of by the provider.

However if setup right, from the beginning, there is not much to maintain.