Even for companies that want to cloud host, there's a concern about if something happens to Shelf itself (eg: the service suffers a major multi-day outage or goes out of business). There needs to be a contingency plan (which is probably some form of self-host).
If usage of a product like this is successful, it both becomes a critical operational system and represents thousands of hours of time invested populating it. There needs to be assurance that investment is not lost and the business is not 'down' in case something happens. I work at an SMB and we use quite a few cloud-hosted services, but whenever we do we discuss the balance of how critical a service it is and what our contingency plan would be. Sometimes it's switching to a competitor (and maybe importing history), sometimes it's pulling the open source version and hosting ourselves.
The product looks great, but all I can see is "Data backup and recovery" as a feature. I don't know what that means or what happens if shelf.io disappears, so that's a huge red flag for me, unfortunately.
Apart from self-host and open source, do you have other suggestions on how to address this on a product level? Would you feel comfortable with structured exports for example?
Honestly this is a hard problem and something of a catch-22: the more useful the product is, the more it gets used, so the more critical it becomes, and as a result the pain goes higher.
A long track record of business, knowing if the company is profitable vs burning through VC cash, and some type of SLA and guarantee of minimum shut down notification time could all help lower risk. I don't really have any other product suggestions, unfortunately. My feeling is this is not really a technical problem and so probably doesn't have a purely technical solution.
Like I mentioned somewhere else, I actually like using Confluence depending on the use case. It tends to require much more attention in making sure things stay organized and well structured. Shelf has this built-in by being more opinionated (for better or worse, depending on what you need).
Our architecture is generally built in a way with self-hosted in mind but it's somewhere down the road and not something we'll have in the short to mid-term.
For my own part I struggle to find data that's strewn across frequently deprecated PDF's, salesforce, one-drive / sharepoint, mailing list archives, a home-spun knowledge base, yammer, an aging twiki instance, and possibly a few more information repositories. And I work in a relatively small and tech-savvy organisation. So I definitely feel the pain you're trying to cure. :)
'Cloud' is tricky. No two people agree what that word means for starters. In terms of a knowledge repository / index / retrieval system -- for many enterprises, when talking about core institutional knowledge, 'manage yourself' is not the opposite of 'in the cloud'.
My use of 'cloud' wasn't very exact, you're right. I suppose most enterprises have or will have their 'own' infrastructure in the cloud and manage it there themselves. I really meant cloud in the way of a SaaS-model.