Comment by bossyTeacher
4 days ago
> 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).
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
> 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.
Lol this made me laugh, there's a reasonable likelihood that time will be filled with meetings.
Heh, true. Although in fairness I said the business can repurpose the time to make money, not that they will. I'm splitting hairs, but it seems in keeping with the ethos here. ;)
Yea I agree.. better outsource product development, management, and everything else too by that narrative
Unironically - I agree. You should be outsourcing things that aren't your core competency. I think many people on this forum have a certain pride about doing this manually, but to me it wouldn't make sense in any other context.
Could you imagine accountants arguing that you shouldn't use a service like Paychex or Gusto and just run payroll manually? After all it's cheaper! Just spend a week tracking taxes, benefits and signing checks.
Self-hosting, to me, doesn't make sense unless you are 1.) doing something not offered by the cloud or a pathological use case 2.) or running a hobby project or 3.) you are in maintaince mode on the product. Otherwise your time is better spent on your core product - and if it isn't, you probably aren't busy enough. If the cost of your RDS cluster is so expensive relative to your traffic, you probably aren't charging enough or your business economics really don't make sense.
I've managed large database clusters (MySQL, Cassandra) on bare metal hardware in managed colo in the past. I'm well aware of the performance thats being left on the table and what the cost difference is. For the vast majority of businesses, optimizing for self hosting doesn't make sense, especially if you don't have PMF. For a company like 37signals, sure, product velocity probably is very high, and you have engineering cycles to spare. But if you aren't profitable, self hosting won't make you profitable, and your time is better spent elsewhere.
You can outsource everything, but outsourcing critical parts of the company may also put the existence of the company in the hand of a third-party. Is that an acceptable risk?
Control and risk management cost money, be that by self hosting or contracts. At some point it is cheaper to buy the competence and make it part of the company rather than outsource it.
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I'm totally with you on the core vs. context question, but you're missing the nuance here.
Postgres's operations is part of the core of the business. It's not a payroll management service where you should comparison shop once the contract comes up for renewal and haggle on price. Once Postgres is the database for your core systems of record, you are not switching away from it. The closest analog is how difficult it is/was for anybody who built a business on top of an Oracle database, to switch away from Oracle. But Postgres is free ^_^
The question at heart here is whether the host for Postgres is context or core. There are a lot of vendors for Postgres hosting: AWS RDS and CrunchyData and PlanetScale etc. And if you make a conscious choice to outsource this bit of context, you should be signing yearly-ish contracts with support agreements and re-evaluating every year and haggling on price. If your business works on top of a small database with not-intense access needs, and can handle downtime or maintenance windows sometimes, there's a really good argument for treating it that way.
But there's also an argument that your Postgres host is core to your business as well, because if your Postgres host screws up, your customers feel it, and it can affect your bottom line. If your Postgres host didn't react in time to your quick need for scaling, or tuning Postgres settings (that a Postgres host refuses to expose) could make a material impact on either customer experience or financial bottom-line, that is indeed core to your business. That simply isn't a factor when picking a payroll processor.
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That’s pretty reductive. By that logic the opposite extreme is just as true: if using managed services is just as bad as outsourcing everything else, then a business shouldn’t rent real estate either—every business should build and own their own facility. They should also never contract out janitorial work, nor should they retain outside law firms—they should hire and staff those departments internally, every time, no nuance allowed.
You see the issue?
Like, I’m all for not procuring things that it makes more sense to own/build (and I know most businesses have piss-poor instincts on which is which—hell, I work for the government! I can see firsthand the consequences of outsourcing decision making to contractors, rather than just outsourcing implementation).
But it’s very case-by-case. There’s no general rule like “always prefer self hosting” or “always rent real estate, never buy” that applies broadly enough to be useful.
I'll be reductive in conversations like this just to help push the pendulum back a little. The prevailing attitude seems (to me) like people find self-hosting mystical and occult, yet there's never been a better time to do it.
> But it’s very case-by-case. There’s no general rule like “always prefer self hosting” or “always rent real estate, never buy” that applies broadly enough to be useful.
I don't know if anyone remembers that irritating "geek code" thing we were doing a while back, but coming up with some kind of shorthand for whatever context we're talking about would be useful.
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So well said, I like the technique of taking their logic and turning it around, never seen that before but it’s smart.
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