Timo Hilbrink wrote:
I agree that self-hosting everything would be the ideal solution, but we also need to be realistic, and conclude that this might not be possible within the current financial budget.
It is a common misconception that commercial cloud services are inherently more cost-effective than self-hosting. In fact, the opposite is often true once a certain scale of usage is reached. Cloud providers charge recurring fees for compute, storage, bandwidth, monitoring, and often even for support – all based on proprietary pricing models that are difficult to predict and control. Hosting even basic services on platforms like S3 or EC2 can become significantly more expensive over time than running well-managed, dedicated infrastructure, especially for sustained workloads, high I/O, and long-term data retention. When properly designed and operated – using virtualization, standard hardware, automation tools, and efficient monitoring – self-hosting is not only more cost-efficient in the medium to long term, but also offers maximum independence, transparency, and compliance with data protection standards. This does not mean everything must be migrated at once. But the assertion that self-hosting is “not feasible within the current budget” should at least be subject to a differentiated cost-benefit analysis before being used to guide strategic decisions. -- nemox.net Rudolf E. Steiner r.steiner@nemox.net http://nemox.net/pdat/res/