Figment vs HA Hosting: Mac Hosting Compared

HA Hosting (hahosting.com/mac-mini-colocation/) sells Mac Mini colocation from £45 + VAT / month on a monthly contract in Sheffield, UK: you ship your own Mac, they rack it with power, a 1 Gbit/s port and 25 TB of transfer. Figment sells the opposite side of the trade — a Mac you rent by the month, with managed options on top. If you already own current Apple silicon and just want it hosted in the UK, HA Hosting wins on headline price. If you don't own the hardware, or you want someone else to run the CI pipeline, Figment's rental is the direct answer. Start a Figment quote at /mac-hosting/start.

Direct verdict and the Figment option to pick

• You own a Mac Mini (M1–M6) and want UK colocation: stay with HA Hosting. £45 + VAT, monthly rolling, no setup fee is a clean deal for rack + network only.
• You need a rented Mac, no hardware to ship: request Figment M-series from $95/month. Exact chip, RAM and disk are confirmed in the quote — $95 is the entry price, not a verified M4/16 GB spec.
• You need the CI pipeline run for you: Managed Build Mac, $249/month — one M-series Mac with CI setup, backups, monitoring and 30 minutes of monthly support included.
• A whole small team: Managed Mac Team, $999/month — two M-series Macs, two CI runners, team setup, backups, monitoring and one hour of monthly support.
• Legacy Intel-only toolchain: virtual Intel macOS, $29/month (2 vCPU, 8 GiB RAM, 80 GiB disk). It runs compatible Intel Mac toolchains — per Apple's Xcode system requirements, Xcode 16.4 is the last Intel-compatible release, so the VM can host Xcode 16.4 and earlier supported Intel builds. It is not Apple silicon, not a physical Mac, and has no GPU or audio. Physical Intel and M-series requests collect until supply is confirmed.

Published terms side by side

HA Hosting's page clearly lists the £45 + VAT headline, the 25 TB transfer allowance and the £0.01/GB overage; we did not find a formal uptime SLA on that page. Treat that as "not verified in the source we checked", not as proof of absence.

A worked cost worksheet for one real workload

Target workload: one iOS app, main-branch CI, roughly 40 build minutes a day, under 1 TB of outbound transfer a month. Twelve-month horizon.

Assume £1 ≈ $1.26 for rough conversion only (use the rate on your invoice date).

Route A — You already own a Mac Mini M4, colocate at HA Hosting

• Monthly: £45 + 20% VAT = £54.00/month (£45 × 1.20).
• 12 months: £54.00 × 12 = £648.00 (~$816).
• Add: your Mac's purchase or depreciation, your own CI engineering time, failed-disk risk.

Route B — Rent an M-series Mac from Figment

• Monthly: $95.00/month entry price (exact spec in the quote).
• 12 months at the monthly rate: $95 × 12 = $1,140.00 (~£905). Confirm any annual term and discount in writing before paying up front.
• Add: nothing for hardware, nothing for rack.

Route C — Managed CI on Figment (no DevOps hire)

• Monthly: $249.00/month for Managed Build Mac.
• 12 months: $249 × 12 = $2,988.00 (~£2,372).
• Includes: one M-series Mac, CI setup, backups, monitoring, 30 minutes of monthly support. Overage support time is out of scope of the listed inclusion.

Break-even against Route A depends on what you value the engineering time at. One hour of senior DevOps time per month at £80/hour is £960/year — more than the Route A → Route C gap once you account for hardware purchase. If you have no DevOps capacity at all, Route C is the honest apples-to-apples comparison, not Route B.

Hardware, access and toolchain fit

HA Hosting accepts M1 through M6 Mac minis, so a colocated current Mac runs the full Xcode lineup, including Xcode 27.x on macOS Tahoe 26.6+. Per Apple's Xcode system requirements:

• Xcode 27.x requires macOS Tahoe 26.6 or later and Apple silicon.
• Xcode 26.x requires Apple silicon; the exact macOS minimum varies by point release.
• Xcode 16.4 is the last Intel-compatible release (macOS Sequoia 15.3 – Tahoe 26.1.x).
• visionOS development requires Apple silicon.

A colocated M-series Mac at HA Hosting and a rented M-series Mac at Figment both handle current iOS, macOS and visionOS targets. Figment's $29 virtual Intel macOS does not — pick it only when you have a project pinned to Xcode 16.4 or earlier.

Access model differs materially. Colocation gives you direct admin over hardware you own and remote reboot through HA Hosting's control panel. Figment's virtual Intel macOS is reached through a browser console; outbound CI agents on the VM can reach your CI service, but inbound public SSH to the $29 VM is not currently offered. Confirm the access path you need in the Figment quote.

Migration: HA Hosting colocation → Figment M-series rental

Use this when the decision is "stop paying for rack space; rent instead." It avoids the three mistakes we see most often: exporting the whole environment to a text file, importing provisioning profiles into Keychain, and counting a failed build as a fast one.

Before you give notice

• Request a Figment M-series quote at /mac-hosting/start. Confirm chip, RAM, disk, billing term and any setup fee in writing.
• List every CI secret by name in a shared doc: signing identity, App Store Connect API key, notarization credentials, third-party tokens. Names only; no values.
• Note the exact Xcode and macOS versions on the colocated Mac.

On the HA Hosting Mac

• In Keychain Access, export each signing identity as an encrypted .p12 (certificate and private key). Store the passphrase in your team secret manager.
• Download each provisioning profile as a .mobileprovision from the Apple Developer portal — they are files on disk, not Keychain exports.
• Commit Fastfile, workflow YAML and any build scripts to the repo. Do not env > secrets.txt; that file will contain tokens.
• Snapshot persistent caches (DerivedData is disposable; SPM/CocoaPods caches are optional).

On the Figment Mac

• Install the same Xcode point release before importing certificates.
• Import each .p12 into the login keychain; drop .mobileprovision files into ~/Library/MobileDevice/Provisioning Profiles/.
• Restore secret values from your secret manager into the CI runner's environment — never from a plaintext file copied across machines.
• Update any allowlists you actually maintain (your artifact store, your self-hosted services, your VPN). Apple does not publish a fixed App Store Connect ingress allowlist, so don't add one.

Cutover test

Run this on the Figment Mac against your own repo. It is an example, not a benchmark — set -euo pipefail makes a failed build stop the script before any timing line is reached, so a "fast" run that never prints the success line is a failure, not a win.

set -euo pipefail

PROJECT="YourApp.xcworkspace"          # your workspace or .xcodeproj
SCHEME="YourAppRelease"                # a scheme that actually exists in $PROJECT
DESTINATION="generic/platform=iOS"

echo "Resolving packages..."
xcodebuild -workspace "$PROJECT" -scheme "$SCHEME" -resolvePackageDependencies

echo "Clean build starting at $(date -u +%FT%TZ)"
time xcodebuild \
  -workspace "$PROJECT" \
  -scheme "$SCHEME" \
  -destination "$DESTINATION" \
  -configuration Release \
  clean build

echo "Clean build finished at $(date -u +%FT%TZ)"

Run three times; keep the median of the runs that reached the final echo. Only then end the HA Hosting contract.

When to stay on HA Hosting

Keep colocation if all three are true: you already own a current Mac mini, you need a UK (or specifically Sheffield) presence for latency or data-handling reasons, and you have the DevOps capacity to run the CI yourself. The £45 + VAT headline is hard to beat when the hardware cost is already sunk.

Switch to Figment when any of these apply: you don't own the hardware, you'd rather not carry failure risk on a single Mac, or you want the CI pipeline, backups and monitoring run for you. Start at /mac-hosting or jump straight to /mac-hosting/start.

Related reading:

• Figment vs Hatmac
• Figment vs Honds IT
• Enterprise Mac fleet: how to request a quote