[mittermayr]

Self-hosting is more a question of responsibility I'd say. I am running a couple of SaaS products and self-host at much better performance at a fraction of the cost of running this on AWS. It's amazing and it works perfectly fine.

For client projects, however, I always try and sell them on paying the AWS fees, simply because it shifts the responsibility of the hardware being "up" to someone else. It does not inherently solve the downtime problem, but it allows me to say, "we'll have to wait until they've sorted this out, Ikea and Disney are down, too."

Doesn't always work like that and isn't always a tried-and-true excuse, but generally lets me sleep much better at night.

With limited budgets, however, it's hard to accept the cost of RDS (and we're talking with at least one staging environment) when comparing it to a very tight 3-node Galera cluster running on Hetzner at barely a couple of bucks a month.

Or Cloudflare, titan at the front, being down again today and the past two days (intermittently) after also being down a few weeks ago and earlier this year as well. Also had SQS queues time out several times this week, they picked up again shortly, but it's not like those things ...never happen on managed environments. They happen quite a bit.

[mattmanser]

Over 20 year I've had lots of clients on self-hosted, even self-hosting SQL on the same VM as the webserver as you used to in the long distant past for low-usage web apps.

I have never, ever, ever had a SQL box go down. I've had a web server go down once. I had someone who probably shouldn't have had access to a server accidentally turn one off once.

The only major outage I've had (2/3 hours) was when the box was also self-hosting an email server and I accidentally caused it to flood itself with failed delivery notices with a deploy.

I may have cried a little in frustration and panic but it got fixed in the end.

I actually find using cloud hosted SQL in some ways harder and more complicated because it's such a confusing mess of cost and what you're actually getting. The only big complication is setting up backups, and that's a one-off task.

[paulryanrogers]

Disks go bad. RAID is nontrivial to set up. Hetzner had a big DC outage that lead to data loss.

Off site backups or replication would help, though not always trivial to fail over.

[arwhatever]

Me: “Why are we switching from NoNameCMS to Salesforce?”

Savvy Manager: “NoNameCMS often won’t take our support calls, but if Salesforce goes down it’s in the WSJ the next day.”

[dilyevsky]

This ignores the case when BigVendor is down for your account and your account only and support is mia, which is not that uncommon ime

[TheNewsIsHere]

Just wait until you end up spending $100,000 for an awful implantation from a partner who pretends to understand your business need but delivers something that doesn’t work.

But perhaps I’m bitter from prior Salesforce experiences.

[madeofpalk]

> but it allows me to say, "we'll have to wait until they've sorted this out, Ikea and Disney are down, too."

From my experience your client’s clients don’t care about this when they’re still otherwise up.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

Yes but the fact that it's "not their fault" keeps the person from getting fired.

Don't underestimate the power of CYA

[blitz_skull]

From my experience, this completely disavows you from an otherwise reputation damaging experience.

[vb-8448]

You can still outsource up to VM level and handle everything else on you own.

Obviously it depends on the operational overhead of specific technology.

[bossyTeacher]

> Self-hosting is more a question of responsibility I'd say. I am running a couple of SaaS products and self-host at much better performance at a fraction of the cost of running this on AWS

It is. You need to answer the question: what are the consecuences of your service being down for lets say 4 hours or some security patch isn't properly applied or you have not followed the best practices in terms of security? Many people are technically unable, lack the time or the resources to be able to confidently address that question, hence paying for someone else to do it.

Your time is money though. You are saving money but giving up time.

Like everything, it is always cheaper to do it (it being cooking at home, cleaning your home, fixing your own car, etc) yourself (if you don't include the cost of your own time doing the service you normally pay someone else for).

[bigstrat2003]

> Like everything, it is always cheaper to do it (it being cooking at home, cleaning your home, fixing your own car, etc) yourself (if you don't include the cost of your own time doing the service you normally pay someone else for).

In a business context the "time is money" thing actually makes sense, because there's a reasonable likelihood that the business can put the time to a more profitable use in some other way. But in a personal context it makes no sense at all. Realistically, the time I spend cooking or cleaning was not going to earn me a dime no matter what else I did, therefore the opportunity cost is zero. And this is true for almost everyone out there.

[PunchyHamster]

You can pay someone else to manage your hardware stack, there are literal companies that will just keep it running, while you just deploy your apps on that.

> It is. You need to answer the question: what are the consecuences of your service being down for lets say 4 hours or some security patch isn't properly applied or you have not followed the best practices in terms of security?

There is one advantage self hosted setup has here, if you set up VPN, only your employees have access, and you can have server not accessible from the internet. So even in case of zero day that WILL make SaaS company leak your data, you can be safe(r) with self-hosted solution.

> Your time is money though. You are saving money but giving up time.

The investment compounds. Setting up infra to run a single container for some app takes time and there is good chance it won't pay back for itself.

But 2nd service ? Cheaper. 5th ? At that point you probably had it automated enough that it's just pointing it at docker container and tweaking few settings.

> Like everything, it is always cheaper to do it (it being cooking at home, cleaning your home, fixing your own car, etc) yourself (if you don't include the cost of your own time doing the service you normally pay someone else for).

It's cheaper if you include your own time. You pay a technical person at your company to do it. Saas company does that, then pays sales and PR person to sell it, then pays income tax to it, then it also needs to "pay" investors.

Yeah making a service for 4 people in company can be more work than just paying $10/mo to SaaS company. But 20 ? 50 ? 100 ? It quickly gets to point where self hosting (whether actually "self" or by using dedicated servers, or by using cloud) actually pays off

[jbverschoor]

Yea I agree.. better outsource product development, management, and everything else too by that narrative

[Thaxll]

That argument does not hold when there is aws serverless pg available, which cost almost nothing for low traffic and is vastly superior to self hosting regarding observability, security, integration, backup ect...

There is no reason to self manage pg for dev / environnement.

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/

[starttoaster]

"which cost almost nothing for low traffic" you invented the retort "what about high traffic" within your own message. I don't even necessarily mean user traffic either. But if you constantly have to sync new records over (as could be the case in any kind of timeseries use-case) the internal traffic could rack up costs quickly.

"vastly superior to self hosting regarding observability" I'd suggest looking into the cnpg operator for Postgres on Kubernetes. The builtin metrics and official dashboard is vastly superior to what I get from Cloudwatch for my RDS clusters. And the backup mechanism using Barman for database snapshots and WAL backups is vastly superior to AWS DMS or AWS's disk snapshots which aren't portable to a system outside of AWS if you care about avoiding vendor lock-in.

[jread]

This was true for RDS serverless v1 which scaled to 0 but is no longer offered. V2 requires a minimum 0.5 ACU hourly commit ($40+ /mo).

[maccard]

Aurora serverless requires provisioned compute - it’s about $40/mo last time I checked.

[gonzo41]

Just use a pg container on a vm, cheap as chips and you can do anything to em.