[kilroy123]

Interesting, I've always worked at places that prefer to pay someone else for the trouble and use a ton of third-party tools for all the things.

In the end, do you think the self-hosting route is worth all the trouble and costs?

[input_sh]

It's certainly cheaper to have a couple of sysadmins, but then again, it depends on how valuable is the stuff you're dealing with. Small web agency? Probably not. Supporting dozens of journalists (like my org)? Absolutely.

There are also trade-offs. A few sysadmins can't host emails against hostile (sometimes state-sponsored) parties like Google can. We can't roll out a better messaging service than Signal. We could roll out our own VPN, but if the goal is getting lost in the noise, you want a popular VPN, not routing journalists' traffic through unique IPs.

On the other hand, just Nextcloud and GitLab (two fairly common services) require about 10h/month if you don't want to be major versions behind or miss security patches in minor versions.

[walteweiss]

Would you mind to elaborate on the VPN thing? We do work with journalists as well and we see private Wire Guard configuration as a better option, as nobody knows that’s a VPN a journalist connects to.