> Of course you'll still need to appoints someone to manage your hosted environments if you decide to go with external services. Fair point! It's also fair to

> Of course you'll still need to appoints someone to manage your hosted environments if you decide to go with external services. Fair point! It's also fair to say that managing hosted Office365/Exchange is a very different skillset/background than a traditional Linux sysadmin role, and that they were making use of the resources they've had at hand (considering how finding a reliable IT partner can be challenging by itself; I've seen many shops struggle with that). Still, my original post was how your branding/perception as a self-hosted project can be ruined by someone else's mistakes in setting up said self-hosting. I've been on the other side of that fence, trying to convince the management of a different company, to host a particular service - one of the execs had a horror story, and our team had a hard time working out a compromise. For open source projects, which rely on contributions, this external perception by decision-makers (or decision-makers-in-the-making) can have real impact.