[RevEng]

Running a service is one thing. Keeping it reliable and secure is another. Especially if you are a start-up. You have limited capital and even more limited developer time. Don't waste either on building your own infrastructure.

If you are worried about someone stealing your ideas, don't be. First, nobody cares about what you have until you make it big, which is going to happen a long time from now if ever. Second, the major services all provide enterprise deals that ensure privacy, enough that the largest companies in the world and many governments rely on them. You are far more likely to be hacked if you try to roll your own than if you use a popular service - especially if you aren't an experienced IT admin.

If you are in a start-up you want to put your full focus on your product - don't waste time on infrastructure. Use popular online services, use popular brands for hardware, use popular languages and popular libraries. Use anything you can to get you going as quickly and as painlessly as possible so you can focus on building your product and your business. That's going to be hard enough.

I say this as someone who worked with a start-up from inception to being acquired 10 years later. I was the guy building the networks and the servers and the desktops. We cobbled together our own systems from white box parts and using free software that required lots of setup and maintenance. I spent a lot of my time maintaining that stuff instead of working on our products. When we got acquired, the first thing they did was throw all that stuff out and switch to their existing systems that were all the well regarded name brands that you know. Since then, everything just works.

[sgarland]

This advice is repeated constantly, and it’s taken as gospel.

If you / your team know what you’re doing, you can absolutely run your own stuff without it being a nightmare. I’ve worked at a 9-digit-ARR SaaS where we ran our own servers (as in, we owned physical servers, not a VPS), ran our own networks, etc. Everything was in IaC. There were shockingly few incidents compared to literally every other SaaS I’ve worked at since.

We didn’t self-host email / file sharing, to be clear – that’s a fool’s errand due to IP reliability rules. Google Workspace is great.

I’m not trying to specifically call you out here, I’m just trying to counter the general argument that it’s impossible to do what the big providers do while still having a reliable service.

[RevEng]

I don't disagree - there are people who are capable and willing to put in the effort. But I don't think that's most people - especially people asking how to do it. There's a lot to know about how to do things properly, so if you don't have at least one person who has been there and done that, I think it's not worth the effort.

[sgarland]

Most people probably aren’t up for it, no, but I fear that if newer generations of devs just see “no, you can’t,” they’ll never try.