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Comment by misterrobot | Hacker News Reader

Because when you host it yourself, it can be off of the public internet.

That's not very useful for your CEO/CTO/CFO/sales/etc when they are offsite or traveling.

A VPN resolves this issue and provides encryption and authentication.

A VPN is non-trivial to set up correctly. Have you set up an internal DNS to prevent leaking the domains from requests? How about IPv6 leaks? There are many things to consider, and I wouldn't trust a random programmer to do it correctly.

I wouldn't trust your programmer much at all if they couldn't configure OpenVPN with correct DNS settings, given some time.

Many good resources exist: https://www.linode.com/docs/networking/vpn/set-up-a-hardened...

and what about if your network is compromised? For most small-medium businesses, that's more likely than Slack being compromised.

Slack already had a public compromise. Most small businesses haven't been publicly compromised.

I'm not saying it's safer to self-host. There are a ton of foot-guns with operating your own IRC server.

It mostly depends on if you're a target. I must have missed when Slack was compromised, but I'm willing to take the risk of Slack being hacked, as I'm not a target. Im a fan of the methodology that bigger company = more secure, although that's obviously not always the case.

That said, you bypass a ton of those foot-guns if you just stick everything behind a corporate VPN with 2FA and the appropriate security. As long as the VPN is secure, everything behind it is secure.

> and what about if your network is compromised? For most small-medium businesses, that's more likely than Slack being compromised.

If your network and/or workstations are compromised, it is _over anyway_ because they have all your data. This is one of those situations where you are saying "What if they decapitated me? Slack might still be secure."

I mean, technically, you are correct but it isn't relevant because you are dead.

If you think such a business can survive a pentest from an employee workstation...XD

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