What Does Self-Hosting Actually Require?
The choice between private cloud infrastructure and self-hosting is less about technology and more about risk, cost-predictability, staffing, and operational focus.
High availability
Redundant connectivity
Ransomware-protected and isolated backups
Clustered systems
Continuous monitoring
Security
Patching
Seamless updates
These features are not easy to maintain nor are they cost-effective when you self-host. In traditional on-premise environments, each of these capabilities is added piecemeal — driving up cost, complexity, and risk.
When organizations account for the full reality of on-prem infrastructure, costs escalate quickly and unpredictably. Hosting an environment requires:
- Hardware
- Licenses
- Backup and security platforms
- High-availability architecture
Along with 24/7 staff to deploy, monitor, and manage it all.
The operating costs of a private cloud environment, such as Protected Cloud, are more predictable and don’t require upfront hardware purchases. Self-hosting, however, requires significant capital investment and recurring refresh cycles every 3-5 years. Not to mention unexpected costs related to power, cooling, maintenance, downtime, emergency replacements, and more. Sure, having total ownership seems great, but that means you have to deal with the total cost of ownership. Self-hosting also requires internal engineers and on-call coverage, meaning it comes with staffing and operational burdens that introduce key-person dependency risk.
Another thing to consider is the worst-case scenario. Certain private clouds have redundancy and disaster recovery built in, but in self-hosted environments, these features must be separately designed, funded, and maintained. Self-hosted environments also rely heavily on internal discipline and additional tooling to meet security and compliance requirements.
Not to mention the difficulties you’ll face as your companies tries to grow. Self-hosting requires purchasing and installing new hardware, often leading to capacity planning challenges that make it difficult to scale without procurement delays.
The bottom-line — self-hosting gives you complete control — but it also places the full responsibility of your environment on your shoulders alone.
Public Cloud: Tradeoffs Over Time
Public cloud environments place the burden of architecture, monitoring, and incident response on you as the customer. When incidents occur, this often requires coordination across multiple vendors while outages persist.
On top of managing complex architectures and coordinating multiple vendors, organizations also have to deal with financial uncertainty. Public cloud environments are good for elasticity and scale, but this comes at a cost. Public cloud providers offer tools that make it easy to add or subtract servers and systems, along with distributing them geographically. However, the cost of these tools is often unpredictable. Public cloud users are often charged for every bit of network traffic, disk traffic, storage usage — even private network communication between two servers.
Public cloud costs are ever growing without cost details, so organizations don’t fully understand what they’re paying for. Public cloud environments also introduce hundreds of services, pricing variables, and dependencies that increase cost uncertainty and operational complexity over time.
A major distinguisher between public cloud environments and private cloud environments is the infrastructure itself. Most cloud deployments are an empty VM. The dashboard like nature encourages quickly spinning up resources or environments without the thought of how they all fit together. This can lead to insecure or illogical designs and wasted resources. Public cloud deployments charge you both for the resources you allocate AND the traffic moving inside your deployment between VMs. This means over allocation of resources, inefficient or busy code, and unused cloud resources all result in higher costs
However, private cloud environments like Protected Cloud provide dedicated resources sized specifically for your workloads. This ensures consistent performance without noisy-neighbor risk. Public cloud environments rely on shared infrastructure where performance can fluctuate and optimization becomes an ongoing effort.
Providing consistent, reliable performance is key for any organization. This ensures staff can get work done, customers remain happy, your reputation isn’t impacted, and profits can continue to grow. Because public clouds rely on shared infrastructure, performance can vary as workloads change and scale, requiring ongoing tuning and active management to maintain consistency over time — which are your responsibility.
When problems do occur, you have to submit a ticket to your cloud vendor and wait for a response. Sometimes you’ll be directed to a status page with updates about ongoing issues, but often you’re stuck waiting and have to hope that whatever response you get is helpful.
Another issue that arises with public cloud environments is misalignment with security and compliance. Protected Cloud is a private cloud environment built with a compliance-first design, while public cloud security follows a shared-responsibility model. This often leads to confusion, misconfiguration, and additional consulting costs.
The bottom-line — public cloud environments are great for elasticity and scalability — but private cloud environments are the better long-term solution for stability, cost predictability, and security.
