[seldo]

Funny you should mention a managed relational database service; Instapaper uses one of those and had more than 12 hours of downtime this week: http://blog.instapaper.com/post/157027537441

No database solution is totally reliable. If storing data is my primary job, like it is GitLab's, I'd like to have as much control of it as possible.

[illumin8]

Let's just say that Instapaper's outage was self-inflicted. You don't see them blaming their cloud provider, do you? People make mistakes, and even with a managed relational database service, you can still make mistakes.

The difference is that Instapaper was able to restore from backups, because their managed service performed them properly. The archive data is taking longer to restore, but that's due to design decisions Instapaper made.