Self-hosting a database sounds terrifying. That narrative has certainly been pushed over the last 10 years by the big cloud providers:
Hosting your own database is dangerous
How are you going to get all the 9s of reliability doing it yourself?
You'll have access to dedicated database engineers that you couldn't (or wouldn't want to) hire yourself
The rumors obscure the truth.
Most cloud hosts are just running a slightly modified version of the open source Postgres server anyway 1
Database engineering is not a silver bullet if your queries are sub-optimal. Abstracting away your engine too much from your code doesn't let you benchmark what's going on and work around the otherwise reasonable constraints of how the engine is actually querying your code.
I've had data corruption when using a 3rd party vendor just the same as I've had when self-hosting. And with a serious markup, what's the point?
I've been running my own self-hosted postgres for the better part of two years now, serving thousands of users and tens of millions of queries daily2. I expected it would give me much more trouble than it has. It's caused me exactly 30mins of stress during a manual migration and that's all. Aside from that it's been fast, stable, and much cheaper.
I sleep just fine at night thank you.
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