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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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