alt Hacker News> 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).
Replies
> 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.
Yea I agree.. better outsource product development, management, and everything else too by that narrative
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