[ownagefool]

The opinions scale.

My last gig had an MSSQL database component that pushed $700,000 a year.

It wasn't _that_ big but it was pushing the upper published limits of what you could do with an MSSQL RDS. One day replication stopped working, and amazon business support of whatever couldn't resolve it.

I've been around the block and have continuously come to the conclusion that it's usually better to have the skills to run them yourself, and then it's just a balance of whether or not you're time or cash poor.

[nicoburns]

It also depends a lot on your scale. My last company was paying $50/month for a hosted database (4gb RAM), we upgraded to one with 8GB RAM for $200/month that was likely to be sufficient for the foreseeable future. That was expensive for what we were getting, but it certainly wasn’t worth our time or effort to build out our own.

[ownagefool]

For sure. If the product makes money and the renders the amount insignificant, I make the same choice.

Opportunity cost and all that.