I've been involved in self hosting From 100 to 70% of our infrastructure for the last 15 years (The percentage has been dropping the last five to six years). This has been with companies with as few as five (various startups) and as many as 2500 (netscape) - with a median of around 500 employees (large enough to have a couple remote data centers and a local corporate data center).

I've never done the full 15 year assessment, but, on average, the smart people throwing themselves into hosting my business applications have performed at, or above, any level that I ever could.

People always talk about down time from third parties, but always seem to forget how much downtime self-hosting induces - particularly as you usually can't afford the 24x7 well-staffed NOC and operations team.

The temptation is always to say "I can do it better myself" - but the reality is you probably can find someone out there who can do it better than you, and, even when you "Self Host" - 95% of the time that really means relying on someone else to provide you a data center with generators/diesel/hvac/security/Sonet/etc...

With that said - Fog Creek is a tiny little operation, that probably operates at, or below the level of our own Operations team - so it's a coin toss as to whether they would do better than us at hosting.

On the flip side - I'm pretty confident that gmail, on average, has had better uptime the last 10 years than the mail servers I've managed. (Though, the last 5 years have been remarkably stable for self hosted email. Exchange has come a long way...)

Indeed! For me all hosted solutions are automatically dead. Too many startups just disappear so quick that I would never do business with them. (And while FogCreek hasn't disappeared so far, at least WebPutty is gone)

Given that this is a unpopular view around here anyway, I want to add another thought:

If your company has it's own webpage at datacenter A, including payment from datacenter/service B with CDN C and Twitter-integration D, using hosted FogBugz for support mails, hosting it's CSS-stylesheets on TRELLO which was baked by Google AppEngine, and using email provider E...

Why don't you have downtime at leas one a quarter???

How can a system that relies on so many components and other companies be reliable? With all those AWS-outtakes? I don' understand this.

If you host most of your stuff yourself, either everything works, or nothing. But not all goes down at the same time.

Just to be clear, WebPutty is not gone. It's operational for another few months on Fog Creek's dime[1]. After that (or now, if you'd like) you can easily host it yourself on App Engine, probably for free, now that it's open source[2].

[1] https://www.webputty.net/ [2] https://github.com/fogcreek/webputty

If a service one once used is retired, open sourcing it is of course the very best outcome. Thanks for that!!!

However (regarding AppEngine based solutions), as far as I know, if AppEngine goes down, there is no way to have any backup, is it? Only google can host AppEngine apps.

This is always true until you're the one without hosting.