Self hosting introduces multiple failure modes making it difficult to achieve redundancy and uptime comparable to purpose built and professionally managed cloud infrastructure.
Downtime can be a serious blow to many startups. And the more important the service is, the less tolerance clients/customers have for it. For any sort of *business* service, you probably risk losing more than you stand to gain.
I run my own servers. I have a hell of a power bill but it’s way cheaper than AWS. My servers would probably cost $2000/mo on demand. Of course any workloads I need to be reliable I run in the cloud.
This concept is not new. What people also miss is that you can simply rent dedicated servers instead of going with AWS. Often times the cloud only gets compared to colo, but renting dedicated servers is actually way cheaper and you still don't have to care about hardware, power, networking, etc.
> I'm paying thousands of dollars a year for AWS when it seems to me I could just buy a computer and a couple solid state drives, and host locally.
What happens when:
- there's a power outage?
- you trip the cable?
- a hardware failure occurs?
- your local ISP's IP is blocked or banned and you have no control over it?
- you have limited upload / download where you are (depends on country)
- your Internet is out or just fails to Cloudflare
And many more...
Not to mention meteorites
In a word --- reliability.
Self hosting introduces multiple failure modes making it difficult to achieve redundancy and uptime comparable to purpose built and professionally managed cloud infrastructure.
Downtime can be a serious blow to many startups. And the more important the service is, the less tolerance clients/customers have for it. For any sort of *business* service, you probably risk losing more than you stand to gain.
I run my own servers. I have a hell of a power bill but it’s way cheaper than AWS. My servers would probably cost $2000/mo on demand. Of course any workloads I need to be reliable I run in the cloud.
> I have a hell of a power bill
And you pay people to operate the setup, the real estate has its price, and you need to upgrade the hardware once in a while.
This concept is not new. What people also miss is that you can simply rent dedicated servers instead of going with AWS. Often times the cloud only gets compared to colo, but renting dedicated servers is actually way cheaper and you still don't have to care about hardware, power, networking, etc.
On prem always has been an option. Check why people preferred cloud for a time and decide what your tradeoffs are.