this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
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Most of my career is built on MS's stack (I fell into .NET development and got good at it. Now I'm in the same boat as COBOL, Java, and Ruby-on-Rails devs: I'm basically a software doula.)
Every job I go into now I'm reccomending they get a migration plan for self-hosting and self-owning. The American tech system is collapsing. AI is causing massive ruptures in knowledge: it obscures searches, it deskills devs, it's castrated the junior-senior-principle ladder such that we're not training enough developers to even pass along all of the knowledge of how current systems work. SaaS is reaching the enshittification threshold and all those businesses that moved everything into the cloud are about to discover that they're hostages and the sinking empire will drag down a lot of collateral damage with it.
I got a junior .NET job, it seems I gotta get out before it's too late. Welp I'm probably damned to microsoft hell considering the state of the job market.
I would like to tell you that the skills you develop in any language or framework will help you with every other one. A joke I've been making my entire career is that every 5 years or so, someone reinvents the database or schemas or the spreadsheet or document rendering (or buses or trains) or some other fundamental tech. When you step back from the specifics and the proprietary bullshit tacked on to "add value", most software is just a database.
If anything, working in many kinds of environments is very good for teaching one to see problems abstractly and find general solutions. From .NET (a jit compiled, memory-managed system), you might branch out into functional programming (F# is .NET and a good intro to ML-style functional languages) or into more dynamic environments (python, Ruby, typescript) or lower-level systems where you need to manage memory (c\c++\rust).
Anyway, I say "I would like to tell you" because as my initial comment laments, I kind of think this industry is dying. The push to replace development teams with one dev and some AI (or even one cheap non-technical "manager" and some AI) is breaking the ersatz system of mentorship that sustains actual knowledge transfers in this field.
I'm starting to feel like a dinosaur, not sure the kind of tech world I learned to survive in is going to exist much longer.
Yep.
Its... pretty much apocalyptic.
C Suite finally 'won'; they decided they could do the job of engineers.
They can't, of course, but their hubris will burn down the world before they admit they don't know something.
Not that my tiny customers have enough of an IT budget to buy their own servers with the recent price hike on memory and ssds.
Self hosting doesn't necessarily imply you need your own hardware.
I have also found that self-hosting, even with your own hardware, is significantly cheaper than the premium cloud hosting (AWS, etc). We priced out a VM server at my company and we found we could rebuy the hardware for it every FIVE months, just from the cloud hosting costs. And that is if we were decently disciplined about turning VMs on and off every day (which we all knew was a fantasy).
That caused us to strike out the premium providers. Leaving us with the non-premium ones (Digital Ocean, etc), co-locating, or in-house hosting.
The other reason that companies like to use AWS is for liability. If you don't own the hardware you're not as responsible for the physical security and maintenance for tons of servers distributed around the world. At least that's what my employer likes about it. For personal use or smaller companies, I def don't see the use case of AWS just out of price and complexity.
I hear you. Personally I never understood the appeal of costly hosting at AWS and such. It just always seemed so expensive. The only benefit it provided, imho, is when you legitimately need to scale very quickly or if you've got a really huge variance in load.
Everything else? My own servers please, and thank you for reading 😁
What I read so far:
The dynamic scaling is what makes it worth it.
Many of the traditional hosting offerings just give you a monolithic VPS/dedicated hardware.
But if you want to up/downscale depending on peak demand during lunch hour it get's complicated.
How much is this true?
Not only are those clouds expensive, they are also slow.
So perhaps a fifth of the peak hardware would be cheaper than the entire AWD and still more than capable.
How much, I can't say. Not my pay grade :p
But for peak demand they can assume a certain amount from historical data or expected load for something special (like an exclusive report everyone would like to read about).
And lunch hours arent shifting around much. So you could schedule more load balancing during the hours of 11am to 3pm in advance.
Just depends on your usecase I guess.
I bet it's great if your business is Spirit Halloween.
Use a Cronjob to turn the servers on or off.
Automate everything you can
Vegetarians nowadays eat eggs, vegans wear leather and self-hosters do it on someone else's computer.
I'm old and grumpy and will stick to calling the modern vegetarians lacto-ovo-vegetarians, tell the modern vegans that veganism is a lifestyle not a diet and insist that a VPS on Hetzner is hosted by Hetzner, even if you have to manage and maintain the VM.
I'm of the opposite opinion - would you mind elaborating on how a selfhosted-on-nonowned-hardware setup would work?
I believe you, but many people self host on rented hardware for various reasons. For example "proper" self hosting comes with upfront cost. But self hosting ln a VPS comes with reliability, uptime, predictability. But you're still the master of the software you host, of backups, etc.
So, running a VM in the cloud is somehow different from "running everything in the cloud"? I'm genuinely confused here, willing to bet I've misunderstood something.
Operating and administering your own systems infrastructure requires that your business invest in the people to do so, this builds institutional knowledge which makes the important bit, the data and knowledge, portable. If the VM in the cloud gets too expensive you can use another provider, or you can buy hardware and run it locally. If the VM provider cuts your service you still have access to your data because you never lost control of it. Problems can be fixed by in house staff that don't suddenly evaporate for arbitrary reasons or have service outages.
If your entire business depends on Microsoft services and it gets too expensive you have no options but to pay more. If your account gets locked then you're out of business until you can get Microsoft to give you access again. If you want to migrate away, there isn't another Microsoft to move your data to and you've replaced all of your technical staff with a support phone number, which isn't currently accepting your calls.
It's a VM that you set up, you have the image yourself, you could put it on a machine in your living room if you had to.
"I'm paying for a colocation of a machine I administer" is very different from "I've written my application such that it can only run inside an AWS system"
Solid example. I could pay Lyrasis to host an instance of Archivesspace for me. They'd control updates, backups, etc, I'd just use the web interface to manage my archival collections.
OR I could rent a server, install Archivesspace myself (it's open source), sysadmin it myself, take on all that headache and control.
They're both in the cloud, but one's software as a service (SAaS) and the other is just a Linux box on someone else's machine. The second is cheaper in my experience, but only if you have someone that can sysadmin it. Otherwise you've got a learning curve ahead of you.
(it's late, so feel free to tell me I've misread the thread).
The idea is that your services run on remote systems without regard for what those systems are (as a VM, docker image, etc.) Your architecture is decoupled from theirs - you can run on an Amazon host one week, and a server in your closet the next.
And as a bonus, systems hosted this way are often harder to scrape as they're all structured differently. Additionally, you can (and should!) take additional measures to protect your data from your provider - something that just can't be done when the provider controls the data architecture.
The end result is the same:
You control what the machine does. The data as well as backups (assuming you arent using specific hardware offerings but just compute and storage)
Example:
I am done with AWS pricing and Azure gave me a fat stack credits to go over there.
Agnostic VMs could be backed up and migrated over to Azure.
Essentially the same as migrating Hyper-V or VMware to Proxmox-VE
Most of our customers are priced out of the hardware we bought zhrough the official distributor channel.
They hiked the prices to 100% of the previous batch.
Meanwhile we bought what we could from numerous resellers to make it DIY.
Not many small customers can afford to drop 10k on a mid/low tier enterprise grade hardware (2x 1.92TB TLC SSDs, RAID controller, Intel E-2434, 64GB DDR5 RAM)
A few months ago this was (fully assembled mind you) around 2-3k
Depending on what they're hosting, it could still be cheaper. My company wants to move a bunch of our old "tech debt" servers to AWS from the physical rack they're in now. The estimated AWS cost for that hosting is about the same as replacing 1/6 of the entire server infrastructure every month.
There is no sound fiscal reason for us to do that, and probably likewise for many others, but Amazon is a nice, big famous company that makes an excellent scapegoat for bad planning, I guess.
Wait, how does Ruby-on-Rails fit with those other ones? Is it a dying framework?
It had it's brief moment in the sun ~20 years ago. It's not dead, of course, but is in no way a "hot" technology today, as I understand it.
Ruby on Rails was always fringe but will always have its advocates
I just like the idea of anything-that-isn't-javascript, and Ruby is an elegant language
Yea, it’s nice; I’ve coded with it.
Rails just never hit the mainstream. That might be because it never had many powerful sponsors. There are some clever people and big companies that think it’s good to use. But I think the support is too scattered to attract an increase of use, so it languishes in the ecosystems.
And having hundreds of well maintained libraries will be the only way it can get popular now. And it cannot attract the new programmers in sufficient quantity to do that. And it cannot increase its sponsors until it has it.
So, it will remain a very cool thing most people won’t use
I kinda like the niche aspect. If you're looking for a language to learn with broad appeal and applicability, then it might not be the best choice. But if you want to learn something unique for the sake of uniqueness, it could be pretty cool.