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Why are more and more people I know choosing self-hosting over SaaS?
aaPanel_team
Member, Host Rep
in General
Lately, I've noticed more and more people I know replacing some of their subscription services with self-hosted apps.
What I don't get is that while it can save you some money, it also creates a lot of extra hassle. You have to handle your own data backups, and if the system goes down, you have to fix it and get it back up and running.
Comments
It's fun, and the feeling of self-control.
We don't make profit anyway, so why to pay subscriptions?
Just self-host. If it goes, it goes. We just learn.
Yeah, they've mentioned that sense of ownership to me too. It only really feels like it's yours when you host it yourself.
The learning journey is also the fun part. How to get this shit going, how it work behind the wheel.
As they say, learning comes at a cost too, haha.
Some people just like being in control of everything themselves.
Usually due to privacy and security reasons.
That’s true. There are also some people who simply don’t want to deal with all that hassle.
Who said SaaS would save your data backups? They get paid to get blamed, similar to the consulting industry.
I have a server , why not to self host
Because it adds layer of complexity, especially when it's not compatible.
Many factors why this is happening. The censorship and even the involvement with global politics by bigtec, doesn't provide their clients the needed data trust. As trust is a requirement when sharing data with the saas provider.
Also its surely easier to run saas because of generative AI. Its like free consulting, before ai, building saas you needed many IT experts. The cheap cloud also helps a lot. Here at LET you can have a 10$ dollar per year vps! Building a frontend and backend with end to end monitoring is now done within a few hours apposed to many months of expensive IT development and hardware selection/installation/configuration work.
This period is very similar like the introduction of personal computing and commoditized server computing as it removed the need for expensive IBM/HP/CRAY hardware and consultants.
so I won't get ransomed over some 5Tb corn
As hardware performance demands grow, I am shifting from self-hosting to a local setup on two mini PC at home. Only a small vps serve as a web server if I must expose it to the public.
The "lot of extra hassle" is completely overestimated, while the increased price and risks of vendor lock-in are usually ignored.
As an example, if one were to self-host a website and it used 100TB of outbound traffic, that will cost maybe $100/mo for a dedicated server to run. Meanwhile if you host this on AWS, you would pay $5,000-$10,000 for bandwidth alone.
In my workplace, from very early in a project I proposed to purchase and rack some more hardware with our ISP and self-manage rather than put everything on cloud infrastructure. Now we're spending 5 figures (monthly) on combined AWS+Azure costs for various internal software we developed to serve maybe 300 staff.
The cost to run these if they were self-managed rather than using a big cloud provider and their managed products (lambda, sqs, sns, rds, documentdb, opensearch, s3, cloudfront, etc) would be 10% of that. And no, the other 90% wouldn't be taken up by extra work involved, that's a myth invented by sales people rather than technical people.
18 months later my manager (probably under pressure from the finance department) consults me asking what it would take to move to self-managed. No surprise -- it's a huge undertaking. All along the way I had been outspoken about costs and warned of vendor lock-in, but was told not to worry about it, so we continued down the rabbit hole. Our applications use numerous proprietary managed services, and our entire development, deployment and CI/CD is catered to the cloud. It would take non-trivial amount of time and effort to change everything to use our own systems.
For larger companies, if things are in budget nobody cares that much. For individuals, hobbyists, and smaller businesses (what you will find on lowendtalk), it hurts the conscience to over pay so much and be totally beholden to cloud providers when we know it can be done more cost effectively ourselves.
Because their hail Mary is
No one got fired for using AWS.People assert that they need proprietary solution because of scaling problems. FOSS solutions exist and often it's more than enough. Then, they thought, "can we do it when our userbase grow 10x". Well, there's no taboo in stress testing the staging.
Yes, there are so many exploits these days and the AI boom will find even more. If you host your own, yes, you have to keep it updated, but you also have much lower attack surfaces and you you isolate them in one VM per app, then you have even better security.
As for privacy... it depends. If you host at home, perfect, if you host it in some DC, then, no.