I've been involved in self hosting From 100 to 70% of our infrastructure for the last 15 years (The percentage has been dropping the last five to six years). T

I've been involved in self hosting From 100 to 70% of our infrastructure for the last 15 years (The percentage has been dropping the last five to six years). This has been with companies with as few as five (various startups) and as many as 2500 (netscape) - with a median of around 500 employees (large enough to have a couple remote data centers and a local corporate data center). I've never done the full 15 year assessment, but, on average, the smart people throwing themselves into hosting my business applications have performed at, or above, any level that I ever could. People always talk about down time from third parties, but always seem to forget how much downtime self-hosting induces - particularly as you usually can't afford the 24x7 well-staffed NOC and operations team. The temptation is always to say "I can do it better myself" - but the reality is you probably can find someone out there who can do it better than you, and, even when you "Self Host" - 95% of the time that really means relying on someone else to provide you a data center with generators/diesel/hvac/security/Sonet/etc... With that said - Fog Creek is a tiny little operation, that probably operates at, or below the level of our own Operations team - so it's a coin toss as to whether they would do better than us at hosting. On the flip side - I'm pretty confident that gmail, on average, has had better uptime the last 10 years than the mail servers I've managed. (Though, the last 5 years have been remarkably stable for self hosted email. Exchange has come a long way...)