I've self-hosted as much as I can since 2000 and as with everything, one should weigh up the costs of self-hosting versus the benefits. First, honestly assess y

I've self-hosted as much as I can since 2000 and as with everything, one should weigh up the costs of self-hosting versus the benefits. First, honestly assess your own level of skill. Then pick a service and decide what it would cost you to host and the cost of failure. For example, let's look at hosting your own email service. The cost of hosting for someone not comfortable with email is quite high. Setting it up correctly requires many steps and if you get it wrong, perhaps your emails don't get delivered and you lose business. Compare this to the cost of using Gmail - effectively zero. However, this does not take the risks into account. Google owns your email and email address. If they, or one of a number of governments decide that the service should no longer be available to you for whatever reason, your email is lost. You could mitigate this by mirroring all your Gmail through IMAP/POP3 and using your own domain name. In security terms, the risk of Google taking away your account is low, but the impact is very high. As an aside, I'd love to use Owncloud but after a incidence where it deleted files, I decided that it's not yet ready for production use.