When I first started building products, I had a strong belief in self-hosting everything. It seemed like the perfect way to keep everything under control, maintain ownership of my data, and avoid relying too much on third-party services.
However, as I dug deeper into the world of solo development, I quickly learned that self-hosting comes with its own set of challenges—ones that can become overwhelming and counterproductive when you're a team of one.
In this post, I’ll share my journey of moving from an all-in self-hosted environment to embracing third-party solutions, and why it’s often a smarter choice, especially for solo developers who aim to ship quality products as fast as possible.
The Appeal of Self-Hosting
When you’re building a product, especially as a solo developer, the idea of self-hosting can be incredibly appealing. The perceived benefits are numerous:
Control: You have full control over the environment, configurations, and data.
Cost Savings: On paper, self-hosting can appear cheaper than paying for managed services.
Independence: You’re not dependent on third-party services, which means you’re protected from price hikes, service outages, and other risks.
These advantages are hard to ignore, and they were enough to convince me to go all-in on self-hosting when I started my first few projects.
The Reality of Self-Hosting
However, the reality of managing a self-hosted environment quickly set in. Here are some of the key challenges I faced:
High Maintenance Overhead: Every self-hosted service needs maintenance. Whether it’s regular updates, security patches, or performance tuning, the time and effort required to keep everything running smoothly is substantial.
Downtime Risks: One of the most painful lessons I learned was the fragility of a self-hosted setup. For example, if a Redis instance goes down, it doesn’t just affect Redis. It can take down your entire email queue, webhook processing, and other dependent services.
Complexity: Self-hosting adds a significant layer of complexity to your infrastructure. Even with tools like Docker, managing a fleet of services (Grafana for monitoring, Uptime Kuma for uptime tracking, RDS for databases, Passport for authentication, BullMQ with Redis for queues, workers for emails, Nodemailer for sending emails, etc.) becomes a full-time job in itself.
Distraction from Core Focus: The biggest issue I faced was that managing all these services took me away from what truly mattered—building and improving my product. Instead of spending my time on product development, I was constantly firefighting infrastructure issues.
The Turning Point: Embracing Third-Party Solutions
After struggling with self-hosting for a while, I reached a breaking point. It became clear that if I wanted to succeed as a solo developer, I needed to rethink my approach. That’s when I started embracing third-party solutions, and here’s why:
Reduced Maintenance: Managed services take care of all the heavy lifting, from scaling to security updates. This freed up my time to focus on developing features and improving the user experience.
Increased Reliability: Third-party providers often have much more robust infrastructure and monitoring than what I could achieve on my own. This translates to fewer outages and a more stable product.
Simplified Operations: By offloading critical services to managed providers, I significantly reduced the complexity of my stack. This made it easier to manage and allowed me to onboard new tools and services more quickly.
Cost Efficiency: While there’s a cost associated with using third-party services, it’s often offset by the time savings and increased productivity. Plus, many providers offer generous free tiers or pay-as-you-go pricing, which is perfect for solo developers or small startups.
Here’s how I now approach building products as a solo developer:
Hosted Databases: I switched to using hosted PostgreSQL databases like Neon. These managed services offer automated backups, scaling, and monitoring, which removes a significant burden from my shoulders.
Hosted Authentication: Instead of managing the authentication system with something like Passport, I now use services like Clerk or Firebase Auth. They handle the heavy lifting of security, password management, and social logins.
Hosted Payment Gateways: Implementing and managing payment systems is complex and high-stakes. I rely on services like Stripe and Lemonsquizzy to manage payments, subscriptions, and other hassles.
Managed Queues and Workers: For task processing and queues, I moved away from self-hosted Redis and BullMQ to managed services like Amazon SQS. These services offer reliability and scalability out of the box.
Email Delivery: Sending emails can be the biggest mess, especially when dealing with deliverability issues and you are configuring a mail server on your own. I now use services like SendGrid or Resend for reliable email delivery.
Blogs and Newsletters: Delivering impactful content to your followers is crucial for building a solid audience. Therefore, newsletters are essential for authentic ecosystem building. After trying to build and manage my own blog and newsletter system, I have now moved to Hashnode.
Conclusion: Focus on What Matters
The biggest lesson I’ve learned through this journey is the importance of focusing on what truly matters. As a solo developer and product builder, your time and energy are your most valuable resources.
By offloading non-core tasks to managed services, you can free up your bandwidth to focus on building great products, rather than getting bogged down in infrastructure management.
Remember, the goal isn’t just to build a product—it’s to build a product that thrives. And that means making smart decisions about where to invest your time and resources.
