In addition to the other comments about what is meant by “hard”, there is a crucial omission in this article: the failure mode of e-mail deliverability can be b

In addition to the other comments about what is meant by “hard”, there is a crucial omission in this article: the failure mode of e-mail deliverability can be both hard to detect, and extremely costly. I wouldn’t mind hosting a blog, because worst case scenario I’m offline for a few minutes, pingdom alerts me, and we’re back. Total cost: some lost blog readers. If I fail my outbound email setup, it can be months before I realise that most of my emails have been getting dropped. Total cost: I depend on email for work and family, so very high. I used to host my own email. Tested with gmail: delivery was fine. Half a year later it turns out Hotmail was silently dropping my mails. I felt betrayed, and learned my lesson: email is hard.