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Comment by mooreds | Hacker News Reader

As someone who works for a company with a product that can be both self-hosted and used as a SaaS, SaaS is where its at.

When you use a SaaS solution, you are taking on risk, sure, but you are able to move much faster. There's no servers to set up and, more importantly maintain. By outsourcing of lot of operational complexity, your team can focus on building unique differentiated features and marketing them.

I love self-hosting and think you can learn a lot by operating your own infra. For certain use cases (really small apps, personal software, stable state) it can make sense. But I feel like SaaS is becoming the default and is definitely 'the future'.

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I think self-hosting is the future, but products can't be both SaaS + self-hosted. The way to self-host would be using self-hosted only products, that are made for easy installation, maintenance and come with support. Most SaaS offerings provide a self-hosted option just as a marketing tactic, they don't want it to be easy to install.

Self-Hosted as a Service can also become a big industry. In fact, there are already many providers who are essentially SaaS-ing some opensource solutions. Think of WordPress hosting.

Really any cloud provider that supports easily deploying Docker already does this. And, truth be told, hosting Docker apps is damn easy.

There could be SHaaS businesses around maintaining systems on behalf of next of kin. All that time poured into a home lab, a bespoke thing that family and friends may rely on.

Legal counseling for a trust or will for the hardware and software. Training and on-call support.

The challenge is keeping the tech in line with what the owner intended, staying off the cloud and preserving their values. That could mean anything from staying on legacy Java to maintaining an automated lawnmower written in embedded Tcl.

I think it all depends on what tradeoffs you prefer. SaaS is more expensive, and I've seen many people get burned in various ways with it. I've never seen one get burned by self-hosting.

I self-host everything specifically because I remain in control of everything and I maintain physical custody of my data, and the software I'm relying on won't change underneath me. Maintenance isn't a big deal. When something goes wrong, I can fix it immediately rather than waiting a random amount of time for some external entity to do it. Setup costs don't matter to me because they're a one-time thing.

That said, I know people that I'd recommend SaaS instead of self-hosting to.

> I've never seen one get burned by self-hosting.

Then, I have no idea where your neck of the woods is, but that’s crazy.

If I had a nickel for every company that self-hosted but didn’t update in time, or self-hosted but had a flawed backup strategy, or self-hosted and hit scaling problems, or self-hosted and suffered a natural disaster, or self-hosted and experienced theft, I would be a millionaire.

Let me clarify -- by "get burned", I mean "suffered serious data loss or loss of services for a meaningful amount of time". I didn't mean "have some sort of problem". Regardless of whether you self-host or not, you're going to have problems. Just different ones, depending on which way you go.

Quite right.

A lack of functional backups isn’t a self-hosted problem, it’s an implementation problem. Plenty of SaaS companies out there variously 1) don’t have backups; 2) conflate backup and sync; 3) don’t test backups; or 4) have perfectly functional and tested backups that cover a level that isn’t useful if a single customer needs a restore.

And all of that could well be the case in any self-hosted environment too. Bad design, lazy or incomplete implementation, and good old fashioned negligence is at home and well in both SaaS and self-hosted shops the world over.

At least with self-hosted you can be either consummately diligent, entirely negligent, or somewhere in between all by yourself.

I agree with everything you said. If you're that small 1% or 5% of the world that is willing to figure out how to self-host, it makes a lot of sense. If you're the average non computer literate person, it's likely not for you.

Same, and agreed.

The minute you go self-hosted, your complexity goes up 10x, as does the services you'll need to provide to maintain it, and the hiring needed to fulfill that need.

WFH is super divisive right now. Imagine telling engineers "how do you feel about flying to Nebraska for a few weeks?" Doesn't work.

You have a self-selecting population of customers though.

I can see using SaaS for exceptional/overflow traffic though.

No money -> Self hosted Some money -> SaaS All the money -> Self hosted

Anything they give you, they can take it away.

to be completely honest, i don't really think "self-hosted is the future" as in "it will take over SaaS majority", I just think it will be more of a thing because it's easier to deploy apps nowadays.

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