I’m curious to know the answer, too. I used to deploy my software on-prem back in the day, and that always included an installation of Microsoft SQL Server. So, all of my clients had at least one database server they had to keep operational. Most of those clients didn’t have an IT staff at all, so if something went wrong (which was exceedingly rare), they’d call me and I’d walk them through diagnosing and fixing things, or I’d Remote Desktop into the server if their firewalls permitted and fix it myself. Backups were automated and would produce an alert if they failed to verify.

It’s not rocket science, especially when you’re talking about small amounts of data (small credit union systems in my example).

No it was not. 15 years ago Heroku was the rage. Even the places that had bare metal usually had someone running something similar to devops and at least core infrar was not being touched. I am sure places existed but 15 years while far away was already pretty far along from what you describe. At least in SV.

Ahah I'm 31, but deciding if it makes sense to manage your own db doesn't depend on the age of the CTO.

See, turning up a VM, installing and running Postgres is easy.

The hard part is keeping it updated, keeping the OS updated, automate backups, deploying replicas, encrypting the volumes and the backups, demonstrating to a third party auditor all of the above... and mind that there might be many other things I honestly ignore!

I'm not saying I won't go that path, it might be a good idea after a certain scale, but in the first and second year of a startup your mind should 100% be on "How can I make my customer happy" rather than "We failed again the audit, we won't have the SOC 2 Type I certification in time to sign that new customer".

If deciding between Hetzner and AWS was so easy, one of them might not be pricing its services correctly.