[flukus]

1. Self hosting doesn't have to operate at the scale of slack, so there's a whole slew of issues avoided. Pushing text messages around really isn't that difficult when you aren't serving millions of customers.

2. You can perform maintenance outside of office hours, with SaaS you don't get to decide when an upgrade (and potential outage) happens. I don't care about 99% uptime, I care about having 99% uptime while I'm working.

3. You can have backup services.

[TylerE]

There's also a wholew slew of issues driven right into.

[flukus]

Such as? If you've got less than 1000 users then you need an extremely basic server, a raspberry pi should more than suffice. Then you've just got a little bit of manual (or automated) administration, software updates and backups mostly.

I really didn't expect my post to be so controversial, is the HN crowd really so terrified about running there own hardware?

[seanp2k2]

I'm guessing that you're being downvoted because there's a lot more to consider. I agree that it doesn't take much hardware these days (most single-board computers would work perfectly well) to service <1k simultaneous chat users with efficient server-side software (e.g. UnrealIRCd or ejabberd). However, to make it as reliable as Slack (99.99% monthly uptime is their SLA) for the price they offer it ( https://www.slack.com/plans ) would likely take considerable engineering effort. Sure, you could set it up, toss it in a closet, and it might have 100% uptime for a year...until it doesn't. If chat is business-critical, there are chat companies that have profit motive to deliver a good service. If chat is a nice-to-have at a company (and you e.g. don't have to worry about data retention laws / compliance stuff), maybe it's fine to run it on an rPi / t2.micro (free) AWS instance.

Luckily, there are a ton of great free and paid options out there these days!

[hedora]

For $6670 a month (price for 1000 users), I’m pretty sure most people here can spin up two VMs in two different colos, and setup IRC servers or whatever.

99.99% uptime means it can be down for a few minutes a month, so all it needs to do is fail over properly. In practice, it will probably have many more than 4 9’s.

I think the real reason slack does well is ease of client + service setup, the brain-dead UI, lots of feature creep that a few people care about, mobile clients, etc, etc.

I’m not a huge fan, but it could be worse. At least they didn’t leak everyone’s password like hipchat did.

[flukus]

$80,0000 a year, for that sort of money you could hire an IRC developer full time and get them to spend a day or two managing the company server.

[acchow]

How can anyone find a decent developer for $80k? Even not factoring in overhead and benefit costs.