> Even low-risk fixes like renaming a database column can break a billing run when a job is currently using that data.

You should tell me how you rename database columns in AWS without breaking anything.

I’m not really sure what the point of this article is, it just seems to promote the company’s migration method with a misleading title. But I highly disagree that self-hosted is harder. With many self-hosted BaaS systems I’d argue it’s easier.

Some vendors I work with have transitioned to SaaS-only models and it's truly painful. I have a perfectly good enterprise datacenter, but I also rent some Windows VMs in Amazon's cloud apparently that I still have to manage the application updates myself, but have to put in a support ticket for the .NET system dependencies if they're missing, because you know, it's in the cloud now so I'm not supposed to access the underlying infrastructure.

I don't always have a choice, but if I do, I will always choose the vendor which will give me an on-premise product. And I guarantee you the companies that do will outlast the SaaS-only ones.

self hosting is obviously a spectrum - with building a physical building for space, getting power, equipment, techs, etc on one end, and something like Google Cloud Run or DynamoDB on the other, but...

I don't see why it's that hard these days. is it really so unreliable to go on something like Hetzner, install Ubuntu, Docker Swarm, and a clustered database like TiDB or CockroachDB both of which support functionality to make it easy to schedule backups to something like s3, or other hosts, or ftp, etc.

Even if you have updates, do it one machine at a time, swarm by default is load balancing your traffic, and you're using a clustered DB so it shouldn't be a problem.

and of course, put it all behind cloud flare, because why not.

I get how like in 2012 it was annoying. you had to use Postgres, which is a great database, but then you had to deal with backups and k8s and swarm barely existed, so you had to roll your own nginx or apache config for load balancing and was annoying. in 2025 seems crazy to not do it. going to the article, obviously you should as a sass support it, if my premise is accepted =)

and before someone talks about security - it's also very easy to set up service accounts or iam improperly and leave your rds, firebase, whatever thing totally open or on defaults...