Self-Hosting PostgreSQL: A Practical Alternative to Managed Cloud Services
By
pavel_lishin
5mo ago· 8 min readenOpinion
100/100
Golden Brown
Bagelometer↗
A five-star bake. Worth schmearing, sharing, saving.
Score100TypeopinionSentimentpositive
Summary
The article challenges the prevailing narrative that self-hosting databases is risky and complex, arguing that self-hosting PostgreSQL can be simpler, cheaper, and more reliable than managed cloud services. The author shares personal experience running a self-hosted PostgreSQL instance for two years, serving thousands of users and tens of millions of daily queries with minimal issues. The piece advocates for self-hosting as a viable alternative to expensive managed services, highlighting better performance tunability and comparable reliability.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledSelf-hosting a database sounds terrifying. That narrative has certainly been pushed over the last 10 years by the big cloud providers.
I've had data corruption when using a 3rd party vendor just the same as I've had when self-hosting. And with a serious markup, what's the point?
I've been running my own self-hosted postgres for the better part of two years now, serving thousands of users and tens of millions of queries daily.
I expected it would give me much more trouble than it has. It's caused me exactly 30mins of stress during a manual migration and that's a
Self-hosting Postgres is simpler and cheaper than managed services suggest, with comparable reliability and better performance tunability.
