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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> But since the entire world economy has turned to purely optimizing for control and profit, there's just no good reason to not screw people over as much and as often as possible, what'll they do ?

I worked on a somewhat well-known (at the time) product that used on-site hosting.

One of our biggest customer complaints was that we didn’t have a cloud hosted option. Many companies didn’t want to self-host. They’d happily pay a premium to not have to host it.

I think HN underestimates the demand for cloud hosted solutions. Companies don’t want to deal with self-hosted if they can pay someone else a monthly fee to do it.

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That's a different situation than with offline first software though. With on-prem hosted solutions you'll have someone whose job it is to maintain that hosting and of course they'll want to push that work off to some service provider.

Yes because its a responsability and generally those are costly. If they don't have real upsides you don't want them. So if you can get the same software utility with none of the management responsability you are very much willing to pay a bit more.

I can't imagine wanting to self-host something like Jira, GitHub, or some wiki product unless there's a very big financial cost difference that more than offsets my time and hardware investment.

Otherwise it seems like I'm just spending time and effort achieving the exact same result.

I work in an org with 8ish FTEs, a handful of student workers, and like 200 volunteers. Almost every service wants $5 or more per user per month, that's $1,140 per month per service. We selfhost open source solutions for everything we can and sometimes have to write something in-house to meet our needs.

That sounds an awful lot like, to you, that is the "very big financial cost difference" I mentioned.

Good luck finding vendor that supports isolation of tenants with sensitive data.

I'm not going to spend time trying to fix problems I don't have.

Obviously if your constraints are different, do what works for you.

That's short-term thinking. By making your business dependent on cloud solutions you are agreeing to future disruptions from forced changes and price increases that you can't foresee and won't be able to do much about when you learn about them.

That factors into financial incentives, doesn't it?

There are also products that still have licensing costs even when you self host.

I've worked at a large company that self-hosted Atlassian products that were a big part of a full-time team's job.

I've worked at a large company that built virtually all their internal tooling in house.

I've worked at a large company that used cloud-based vendors.

They all had tradeoffs.

One of those companies even forced a migration from cloud based CI to internal CI for cost reasons then stopped us halfway through because they couldn't scale up our hosted CI to keep up fast enough.

I could argue your answer is just as short-term thinking when your critical tools end up costing you more hardware, data center, and salary opex than you planned for (which I have seen).

Have you ever checked the cost of GitHub runners? Quickly offsets self-hosting ones.

Runners? Yes. There are definitely some compute/resource heavy things that are more efficient to self host. Until you run out of capacity and getting more capacity involves something like having go buy more hardware and data center space (which I've had to do, though not for CI reasons specifically).

GPU-heavy tasks were also heavily in favor of buying hardware and self-hosting at the time I was making purchasing decisions at my job.

Not everything falls in that bucket and the examples in my comment don't (GitHub isn't just runners).

Edit: I'll also add a question: what part of "unless there's a very big financial cost difference that more than offsets my time and hardware investment" did you think would not cover "have you checked the cost of GitHub runners?"

I didn't say you were wrong, I was just mentioning that I was absolutely amazed when I discovered how much my startup was spending in GitHub runners.

For sure. Everything metered on time scales up shockingly quickly (cost-wise).

In general, I do prefer fixed costs, so self-hosting resource-intensive things makes sense.

I think Gitea is superior to Github to organize your repos. I deploy it in the corp I work for too and everyone is very happy with it. It is blazingly fast running on a small virtual machine.

Granted, this is a business that needs on-premise infrastructure anyway because we have inhouse production. So we have a domain controller that can be used for everything auth. We use a combination of that and Entra (shitty name).

I wouldn't want to host Jira because I don't like to work with it. Our wiki is self-hosted as well.

Sadly, we also buy into MS infrastructure and use SharePoint and co. It is soo incredibly slow to work with...

While you can be cloud only, it isn't an environment I would like to work in. Local alternatives are almost maintenance free these days and the costs are so much less for a faster service.

For me it's just a question of where I would want to invest my org's time.

For example: how much time do I want us to spend looking after a task/ticketing system? About zero. How much time do I want my org to invest in DR planning for our self-hosted wiki? About zero.

So unless there's a convincing difference (cost, features, etc), cloud-hosted SaaS would be my choice there.

The answers also probably change a lot based on how the company operates. Would I have been comfortable with a self-hosted wiki when I worked at Facebook and we had a pretty damn good team providing DBs as a service? Yes. Would I have wanted to do the same when I was the sole infra person in my group at another job? No.

I think some time investment is very sensible for any form of decision about infrastructure. Today we have companies complaining about their software dependence, software license costs have heavily increased.

Also, an experienced admin can setup a repository server in a day. This is probably even less time investment than getting offers for solutions. In my opinion the maintenance amount isn't less with SaaS at all as most maintenance work is integrating data.

We do have a self-hosted wiki. We don't even need to think about it if we want to integrate document search or analysis. We own our data completely here and I would argue that data is quite an important chunk of wealth for a company. Some SaaS companies know that as well and they basically take your data hostage. And as a plus, as many things are on a local network, any access to that data is pretty much instant.

To save time on infrastructure decision overall is a mistake in my opinion. You wouldn't do that for your ERP or CRM solutions either.

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