BIG-IP

Why are so many companies so hostile against self-hosted versions of their product?

LinuxBender on Jan 21, 2023 | parent | next [–] I know the answer but I don't like my own answer. When a company hosts it's own code, they are in control of how it and the infrastructure their code is running on are managed. They can keep everyone on the same version and ensure all the servers are managed following a specific process. If there is a critical bug they can patch it right away, sometimes without getting into details. When people host a companies code, the vendor ends up with a lot more support cases due to externalities that the vendor does not control and the customers of the product will tweak and modify it in ways the vendor did not expect and does not support. The customer can see under the hood and find embarrassing mistakes. The customer may have network configurations and use cases that the vendor never expected their application to reside and function in. There are pros and cons to each method and both the vendor and customer stand to benefit from one method over the other but ultimately the vendor has to decide if they are willing to take on the extra support load and extra time to work with the customer to ensure best practices are followed for the app, the servers, for backups, for disaster recovery procedures, etc... In most cases the vendor does not have the ability to debug a customer hosted instance directly and depend on working with intermediaries sometimes over video chat screen sharing sessions.