[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.