| # Deployment Preferences | |
| I've been using Linux for almost 20 years, so I have plenty of hands-on experience in administering Linux servers, as well as managing Docker deployments, and I even have some experience with Kubernetes. | |
| I self-host software both at home and on a cloud VPS, and so long as cloud infrastructure can be protected by Cloudflare access policies, I have no problem in doing so, even when that means committing personal or sensitive data. None of the data that I commit to projects tends to be that sensitive; it's just standard personal data. | |
| In order of importance (most to least) my motivations for self-hosting or self-deploying anything are usually approximately as follows: | |
| 1 - Data governance: I like to be able to backup my own data and often this is extremely difficult, or impossible, with SaaS tools. | |
| 2 - Cost: This is primarily the case when non-open-source solutions would be prohibitively expensive and is very much secondary to data governance.If I were to try to self-host a to-do list app, and the cost of a SaaS solution was $20 per month, the rationale for doing so would be very unlikely to be related to cost savings. | |
| My priority these days is on finding software that works and is reliable. These concerns are much more important than deployment. | |
| If I were choosing between a SaaS and a self-hostable tool, the only reason I would go with the self-hostable option would be for data protection (if the SaaS tool lacked robust data export functionalities). Otherwise, my preference would always be to use a managed service. |