This comment is needlessly condescending, and you're already describing a ton of system administrator skills that you need to have, plus a good internet connection, plus hardware, which makes a lot of assumptions already.
> Never hot "hacked", never lost important data.
You got lucky. I'm not saying cloud providers are better, I'm saying you got lucky.
...or maybe the risk of "getting hacked" is not as big as it is made out to be given some simple precautions? I am not the only one who "got lucky" after all. Given an up to date distribution with only needed ports open to the 'net and a sensible password for those who use SSH password authentication you'll be safer than at most cloud providers. It is, after all, far more lucrative to try to gain access to the likes of Heroku than it is to JoeSchmoe.org.
Also, "needlessly condescending", give me a break. This site is called Hacker News so it is silly to call a call for exploration - the essence of the hacker spirit - "condescending".
I do not find it condescending. I find the perspective refreshing. Of course self hosting is not an option when building a product, you want to outsource what you do not expect to become an expert at and which is not part of your core business. Any form of operations and hosting quickly becomes such a thing.
Having said that I have also self hosted to 15 years. Arguably services that gave high utility, but never anything related to core business. I for one host everything on Digital Ocean. As a consultant I dont do enterprise cloud deployments very often, but when I do, I chose AWS and the client has the funding and pays for it.
> Never hot "hacked", never lost important data.
You got lucky. I'm not saying cloud providers are better, I'm saying you got lucky.