I just got gigabit bidirectional fiber at home and honestly if I were doing personal stuff or doing very early bootstrapping I'd just host from here with a good UPS. No it wouldn't be data center reliability but it'd work at least until it was ready to put in something more resilient.
You can pay for a business class fiber link too. It's about twice as expensive but they have guaranteed outage response times which is really what you pay for.
> enthusiasts would be better served DIY; put a beige box in a local colo
I mean, like, can I provision a zero ops bit of compute from <mystery colo provider> for $20/month?
Edit: looked up colo providers in my city- “get started in 24 hours, pick a rack and amperage, schedule a call now.”. Yeaaah, no. This is why people use cloud providers instead.
The thing is, running a good SaaS service requires quite a bit of staff and hard operational skills and a lot of manpower. You know, the kinda stuff people always call useless, zero-value add, blockers and entirely to automate.
Sure, we have most of the day-to-day grunt work for our applications automated. But good operations is just more. It's more about maintaining control over your infrastructure at one hand, and making sure your customers feel informed and safe about their data and systems. This is hard and takes lots of experience to do well, as well as manpower.
And yes, that's entirely a soft skill. You end up with questions such as: Should we elevate this issue to an outage on the status page? To a degree you'd be scaring other customers. "Oh no, yellow status page. Something terrible must happen!". At the same time you're communicating to the affected customers just how serious you're taking their issues. "It's a thing on the status page after an initial misjudgement - sorry for that." We have many discussions ilke that during degradations and outages.
