Self-hosting is easy; staying self-hosted is harder.
A really common tension in B2B software is the question of whether to self-host or use a Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Software as a Service (SaaS). Honestly, all options make sense, but it depends on what you are after.
Self-hosting gives you:
✅ Complete control of your data
✅ Digital sovereignty
✅ Lower costs, if you know what you are doing
✅ No vendor lock-in
✅ More freedom
The barrier to entry has gone down a lot in recent years due to tools like Coolify, Dokploy, and Caprover. Now it feels like as long as you know how to SSH into a server and read a Docker compose file, you are 90% ready to self-host.
But that's not the whole picture. Setting up is not what will keep you up at night; what will is
⚠️ Keeping your whole stack up to date
⚠️ making backups and ensuring they can actually restore
⚠️ Tracking vulnerabilities and applying security fixes
⚠️ Monitoring and logging
⚠️ Emergency responses
Having your own service up and running is awesome until you have to figure out why it's down at 3 am on a Tuesday with users breathing fire down your neck.
For many businesses, especially non-technical ones, that is exactly the kind of problem they are trying to avoid. They prefer hassle-free solutions and love not having to think about servers, updates, etc.
This is where PaaS and SaaS shine. PaaS providers take over many of the low-level aspects of hosting software. They handle infrastructure, updates, scaling, uptime, monitoring, and support, depending on the provider and plan.
Sounds great, until the same business clients also want
✅ digital sovereignty
✅ predictable costs
✅ more control
And the debate gets interesting. Thankfully, it's not as black-and-white as it may seem.
It's not “either self-hosted or SaaS”.
It's a spectrum, with purely self-hosted on one end and fully managed SaaS on the other, and in the middle, there is plenty of room to find the solution that fits for you.
You can, for example:
✅ Use Coolify or Dokploy on a VPS, so you control the stack without managing hardware.
✅ Use a non-EU SaaS like Shopify with an EU payment provider if that’s the only personal data to handle.
✅ Use a European PaaS provider like Scalingo if sovereignty matters.
✅ Work with an agency, like ours, if you want help choosing, implementing, and managing everything.
The real question is not whether you should self-host, but whether it makes sense to.
Self-hosting is not hard because of the hosting. It is hard because of everything that comes after. We need to stop romanticizing self-hosting, PaaS, and SaaS because there is no one-size-fits-all solution. There's just your product, your constraints, your risks, and which solution works best for you.
