I’ve nothing against self hosting, but it isn’t necessarily cheaper than saas just because you can get amazing amounts of hardware for what amounts to a rounding error in accounting.
Most of this stuff runs on autopilot once it's set up, which is why these companies have such huge margins.
That rounding error in accounting is also a monthly charge, and it sometimes happens that you get a spontaneous demand for $50K in a week and $200K in the next year. That could buy you enough hardware to run a chat for every school hacking club in the world, and a sysadmin to manage it.
I prefer netcup for my private stuff. Similar pricing and performance like hetzner root servers but their "root servers" are fully virtualized, so you get the hardware and storage/raid management included.
