5 Services You Should Never Self-Host

Advocating for self-hosting means being honest about its limits. Here are five services where the risks of self-hosting outweigh the benefits, and why you should keep paying for the SaaS version.

1. DNS Hosting

DNS is the phonebook of the internet. When it breaks, your website, email, and every service with your domain name stops working. Self-hosted DNS requires at least two geographically separate servers for redundancy. One server going down means your entire online presence disappears. Cloudflare, Route 53, and Cloud DNS handle this at a scale no small business can match. Pay for DNS. It costs 5 dollars per month or less.

2. Payment Processing

PCI DSS compliance is expensive, complex, and unforgiving. A single audit failure can cost more than a decade of Stripe fees. Payment processors handle the compliance burden, the fraud detection, and the liability. Your self-hosted invoicing system should integrate with Stripe or a local payment gateway. It should never store or process credit card numbers directly.

3. Public-Facing SMTP

Sending transactional email (password resets, order confirmations, invoices) from your own server is a deliverability nightmare. Major providers like Gmail and Outlook maintain reputation systems that flag email from unknown IPs. It takes months to build a sending reputation and days to lose it. Use Amazon SES, Mailgun, or Postmark for transactional email. They cost pennies per thousand messages and handle deliverability for you.

4. Video Conferencing at Scale

Jitsi Meet works well for small team calls. Beyond 20 participants, it requires significant server resources for video transcoding. Client-facing calls where quality matters, where dropped frames could lose a deal, should use a paid service. Zoom, Google Meet, or Whereby handle the infrastructure. Self-host Jitsi for internal use. Pay for client-facing video.

5. CI/CD Pipelines

Continuous integration and deployment pipelines build, test, and deploy your software. Self-hosting a CI/CD server (Jenkins, GitLab CI) means maintaining build agents, managing secrets, and troubleshooting pipeline failures. GitHub Actions and GitLab CI SaaS handle this at negligible cost for small teams. The 10 to 20 dollars per month for hosted CI/CD is the best value in software. Spend your time writing code, not debugging pipeline infrastructure.

The Principle

The pattern across all five: self-host when the value is control over your data and your costs. Pay for SaaS when the value is infrastructure you cannot economically replicate. A smart self-hosting strategy is not about replacing everything. It is about replacing the things where control matters and cost savings are real, while outsourcing the things where infrastructure complexity exceeds your ability to manage it.

VPS1 helps you draw that line for your specific business. We will tell you honestly what to self-host and what to keep on SaaS. No dogma, just pragmatism.