I’m sure it’s nice to feel in control of your stuff, but I’d rather do something with my family, read a good book or go for a walk instead of having more of the same shite I put up with all day at work.
Also, do you really want all your personal documents and stuff accessible on your phone to anybody who grabs it while you walk around with it unlocked on a call? Yes you might be using some security locks on folders but are you 100% sure you didn't miss any path to anything interesting?
I'm slowly working towards local storage first, partial one way syncing from phone, deliberate cloud sharing of limited stuff etc. and I'm having no regrets.
Just don't use GCP then?
Every time I've worked with Amazon (from 5 person companies to 2k+ global corps) it's been extremely easy to contact an actual human with very minimal costs.
Currently we have 3 AWS people on a Slack channel and we can ask questions from them at any time, they've even given suggestions on how to optimise costs and have recommended AGAINST using some AWS services because wouldn't fit our use-cases.
For me, I've always had a point-person inside google I can ask, and I'm not a big customer or anything.
However AWS has always been either sales guys who very much did not give a solitary shit about me or robot support. FWIW I'm based in Scandinavia so I wonder if it's a geographic thing.
However one thing is absolutely certain: you are giving up control. After that it's just about trust. As we know about trust: it's exceedingly fragile and difficult to cultivate. One wrong move and you'll realise how powerless you were the whole time, and that's a gut-wrenching feeling.
I've heard of larger companies that can't get anyone, and it must be that they don't know who to call or what they want. All of my AM's have been super responsive...and these are in shops that are anywhere from 200 to 3 people.
I've talked to product engineers occasionally.
Maybe they have a bit on the contact database that says "non-bozo?"
That's the opposite of my experience with Amazon, and I even worked for a company that underwent a "partnership certification" process or w/e it's called. (I.e. we had to take classes on how to use a bunch of useless AWS crap and then test out on that, just to be able to put our product on marketplace).
You are either exceptionally lucky, or maybe Amazon's support is geographically locked (into your location)... or a bunch of other reasons I can think of. Anyhow. Even if what you say was true today, this is no guarantee that it will stay true tomorrow. If Amazon finds it expedient to cut down on support, they will.
It’s good to hear the passion returns eventually though. All the best to you.
To me, hosting my data myself would mean a huge serious commitment to make it run and keep it running, and that’d take all the fun out of it. If I update a dependency of a toy project and everything stops working, I can choose to go bug hunting - or just drop it for a week. If my family photo library disappears due to a hardware failure, my home project manager would rip my head off (if I’m lucky).