I feel like I was misunderstood here. I’m making the same argument you did - it makes little to no sense setting up a VPS yourself if you can just as easily grab your data from the SaaS instance.

And thus administering the server yourself proved to be a waste of time and money as the SaaS was just as resilient? I’m still confused.

And the day your VM host exits the market/bumps their prices/decided to pull the rug from under you, your backups that absolutely couldn’t be made in the SaaS instance will magically continue to exist outside of your Cloud VM setup?

You could, I could. The business-owner who decided to hire @anamethatisnt most likely couldn’t. I fail to see the hardware being the pinch point here - adding a sysadmin to your payroll sure seems like the bigger budget outpost.

I see. And the hardware (realistically for small businesses) one-time payment of say (quite overkill) $10 grand is somehow more prohibiting than adding the sysadmin(s) and whatnot to your payroll? Sounds backwards to me.

Sure. But VPS and colocation are not the same, are they?

So, running a VM in the cloud is somehow different from “running everything in the cloud”? I’m genuinely confused here, willing to bet I’ve misunderstood something.

I’m of the opposite opinion - would you mind elaborating on how a selfhosted-on-nonowned-hardware setup would work?