I think there is a strange psychological trait that I have, and others may as well, where I am much more forgiving breaking my own stuff than having someone else do it.

When you host Jira yourself, the monthly subscription pays for Software + Software updates. When Atlassian hosts it for you, you're paying for Software + Software Updates + Service (hosting). When you hosted yourself, a team gets blasted for not monitoring it or updating it correctly. When Atlassian fails to do it (and charges for it) then they get the heat.

All that to say, I don't think it's a weird phenomenon, it's just you're realizing that you're paying someone else for something that's not delivered on.

People are more forgiving torwards themselves and their own folks, I can understand that. I'm just thinking it's important to make decisions based on facts. Some self-hosters walk around with this "my own basement is safer than Amazon datacenters" attitude and that's just not true (in most cases, I guess :D).

No. The basic assumption is only, that if I pay somebody money for the service and to keep things running, then sudden data loss is unacceptable (and a multi week downtime even more so).

Some companies cannot operate effectively without atlassian products, so a fuckup of that scale might just have legal consequences depending on whom it hits.

> Some companies cannot operate effectively without atlassian products

Kind of their problem to be frank.

> so a fuckup of that scale might just have legal consequences depending on whom it hits.

Any contract those companies signed would have a cap on the retributions by Atlassian for trashing SLA targets

In my years of selfhosting personal stuff I never had a service “sunset“, never lost data, and never had significant downtime.

In the external services I use, downtime of one service or other is to be expected at least a few times a year, and the “sunsets” happen occasionally.

Thing is, public services are solving a much more difficult problem (keeping things running safely for millions).

My own self-hosted services have about 20 min downtime a month.

I’ve never – not at any point in the past 10 years – gone over 24h of downtime.

JIRA will now have 3 weeks downtime.

Distributed systems have complexity that grows superlinear, which leads to more and longer incidents.

We self-host C & J for just shy of 3,000 users and haven't exceeded that.

One difference might be that when you self-host, you are more sensitive of some of the risks, whereas a hosting service might be balancing that risk with a need to scale, and their appetite for risk and tradeoff considerations might be different from yours. It might be that these companies know something that their customers don't, and thus are more willing to take on risks.

In this case, it seems like the company took a risk and it did not go well. The possibility of being able to restore from backups might have been factored into this risk, but the latency of doing so might not have been.

It sounds like Atlassian is doing individual restores, each restore takes a fair amount of time, and they don't have the capacity to do all 400 simultaneously (because why would they). So you just have to wait.

If you're self-hosted, you dedicate as many people as possible/necessary to restoring your service, and it becomes their top priority.

You also have a lot more insight into the detailed inner workings of the restore, making it easier to plan against, instead of just vague "we're working on it" messages for days a time with no clear end in sight.

if my company would be part of the outage, the restoration part would only take 2 days (if we're counting all the data they have, not just jira/conf) but not 3 weeks

so selfhosting may still have certain upsides even with such outage