[mountainofdeath]

Running your own DB is a recipe for disaster UNLESS you know what you are doing and can invest resources continuously in keeping it up. If you have a good DBA, it probably isn't too much of hassle as long as you scale up with the number of DBs and you have automation to help along the way. However, at that point you are almost to a hosted solution anyway.

For hobby projects, a single self-managed instance is fine. For production in a business critical environment, much more thought needs to go in.