Go ahead, self-host Postgres
125 comments
·December 20, 2025mittermayr
bossyTeacher
> Self-hosting is more a question of responsibility I'd say. I am running a couple of SaaS products and self-host at much better performance at a fraction of the cost of running this on AWS
It is. You need to answer the question: what are the changes of your service being down for lets say 4 hours or some security patch isn't properly applied or you have not followed the best practices in terms of security? Many people are technically unable, lack the time or the resources to be able to confidently address that question, hence paying for someone else to do it.
Your time is money though. You are saving money but giving up time.
Like everything, it is always cheaper to do it (it being cooking at home, cleaning your home, fixing your own car, etc) yourself (if you don't include the cost of your own time doing the service you normally pay someone else for).
wreath
> Take AWS RDS. Under the hood, it's:
Standard Postgres compiled with some AWS-specific monitoring hooks
A custom backup system using EBS snapshots
Automated configuration management via Chef/Puppet/Ansible
Load balancers and connection pooling (PgBouncer)
Monitoring integration with CloudWatch
Automated failover scripting
The problem i find with RDS (and most other managed Postgres) is that they limit your options for how you want to design your database architecture. For instance, if write consistency is important to you want to support synchronous replication, there is no way to do this in RDS without either Aurora or having the readers in another AZ. The other issue is that you only have access to logical replication, because you don't have access to your WAL archive, so it makes moving off RDS much more difficult.
molf
> I'd argue self-hosting is the right choice for basically everyone, with the few exceptions at both ends of the extreme:
> If you're just starting out in software & want to get something working quickly with vibe coding, it's easier to treat Postgres as just another remote API that you can call from your single deployed app
> If you're a really big company and are reaching the scale where you need trained database engineers to just work on your stack, you might get economies of scale by just outsourcing that work to a cloud company that has guaranteed talent in that area. The second full freight salaries come into play, outsourcing looks a bit cheaper.
This is funny. I'd argue the exact opposite. I would self host only:
* if I were on a tight budget and trading an hour or two of my time for a cost saving of a hundred dollars or so is a good deal; or
* at a company that has reached the scale where employing engineers to manage self-hosted databases is more cost effective than outsourcing.
I have nothing against self-hosting PostgreSQL. Do whatever you prefer. But to me outsourcing this to cloud providers seems entirely reasonable for small and medium-sized businesses. According to the author's article, self hosting costs you between 30 and 120 minutes per month (after setup, and if you already know what to do). It's easy to do the math...
Nextgrid
> employing engineers to manage self-hosted databases is more cost effective than outsourcing
Every company out there is using the cloud and yet still employs infrastructure engineers to deal with its complexity. The "cloud" reducing staff costs is and was always a lie.
PaaS platforms (Heroku, Render, Railway) can legitimately be operated by your average dev and not have to hire a dedicated person; those cost even more though.
Another limitation of both the cloud and PaaS is that they are only responsible for the infrastructure/services you use; they will not touch your application at all. Can your application automatically recover from a slow/intermittent network, a DB failover (that you can't even test because your cloud providers' failover and failure modes are a black box), and so on? Otherwise you're waking up at 3am no matter what.
molf
> Every company out there is using the cloud and yet still employs infrastructure engineers
Every company beyond a particular size surely? For many small and medium sized companies hiring an infrastructure team makes just as little sense as hiring kitchen staff to make lunch.
add-sub-mul-div
You're paying people to do the role either way, if it's not dedicated staff then it's taking time away from your application developers so they can play the role of underqualified architects, sysadmins, security engineers.
null
spwa4
For small companies things like vercel, supabase, firebase, ... wipe the floor with Amazon RDS.
For medium sized companies you need "devops engineers". And in all honesty, more than you'd need sysadmins for the same deployment.
For large companies, they split up AWS responsibilities into entire departments of team (for example, all clouds have math auth so damn difficult most large companies have -not 1- but multiple departments just dealing with authorization, before you so much as start your first app)
riedel
Working in a university Lab self-hosting is the default for almost anything. While I would agree that cost are quite low, I sometimes would be really happy to throw money at problems to make them go away. Without having the chance and thus being no expert, I really see the opportunity of scaling (up and down) quickly in the cloud. We ran a postgres database of a few 100 GB with multiple read replica and we managed somehow, but actually really hit our limits of expertise at some point. At some point we stopped migrating to newer database schemas because it was just such a hassle keeping availability. If I had the money as company, I guess I would have paid for a hosted solution.
scott_w
> Every company out there is using the cloud and yet still employs infrastructure engineers to deal with its complexity. The "cloud" reducing staff costs is and was always a lie.
This doesn’t make sense as an argument. The reason the cloud is more complex is because that complexity is available. Under a certain size, a large number of cloud products simply can’t be managed in-house (and certainly not altogether).
Also your argument is incorrect in my experience.
At a smaller business I worked at, I was able to use these services to achieve uptime and performance that I couldn’t achieve self-hosted, because I had to spend time on the product itself. So yeah, we’d saved on infrastructure engineers.
At larger scales, what your false dichotomy suggests also doesn’t actually happen. Where I work now, our data stores are all self-managed on top of EC2/Azure, where performance and reliability are critical. But we don’t self-host everything. For example, we use SES to send our emails and we use RDS for our app DB, because their performance profiles and uptime guarantees are more than acceptable for the price we pay. That frees up our platform engineers to spend their energy on keeping our uptime on our critical services.
kijin
Yes, mix-and-match is the way to go, depending on what kind of skills are available in your team. I wouldn't touch a mail server with a 10-foot pole, but I'll happily self-manage certain daemons that I'm comfortable with.
Just be careful not to accept more complexity just because it is available, which is what the AWS evangelists often try to sell. After all, we should always make an informed decision when adding a new dependency, whether in code or in infrastructure.
aranelsurion
> still employs infrastructure engineers
> The "cloud" reducing staff costs
Both can be true at the same time.
Also:
> Otherwise you're waking up at 3am no matter what.
Do you account for frequency and variety of wakeups here?
Nextgrid
> Do you account for frequency and variety of wakeups here?
Yes. In my career I've dealt with way more failures due to unnecessary distributed systems (that could have been one big bare-metal box) rather than hardware failures.
You can never eliminate wake-ups, but I find bare-metal systems to have much less moving parts means you eliminate a whole bunch of failure scenarios so you're only left with actual hardware failure (and HW is pretty reliable nowadays).
matthewmacleod
I don’t think it’s a lie, it’s just perhaps overstated. The number of staff needed to manage a cloud infrastructure is definitely lower than that required to manage the equivalent self-hosted infrastructure.
Whether or not you need that equivalence is an orthogonal question.
Nextgrid
> The number of staff needed to manage a cloud infrastructure is definitely lower than that required to manage the equivalent self-hosted infrastructure.
There's probably a sweet spot where that is true, but because cloud providers offer more complexity (self-inflicted problems) and use PR to encourage you to use them ("best practices" and so on) in all the cloud-hosted shops I've been in a decade of experience I've always seen multiple full-time infra people being busy with... something?
There was always something to do, whether to keep up with cloud provider changes/deprecations, implementing the latest "best practice", debugging distributed systems failures or self-inflicted problems and so on. I'm sure career/resume polishing incentives are at play here too - the employee wants the system to require their input otherwise their job is no longer needed.
Maybe in a perfect world you can indeed use cloud-hosted services to reduce/eliminate dedicated staff, but in practice I've never seen anything but solo founders actually achieve that.
freedomben
Exactly. Companies with cloud infra often still have to hire infra people or even an infra team, but that team will be smaller than if they were self-hosting everything, in some cases radically smaller.
I love self-hosting stuff and even have a bias towards it, but the cost/time tradeoff is more complex than most people think.
prisenco
| self hosting costs you between 30 and 120 minutes per month
Can we honestly say that cloud services taking a half hour to two hours a month of someone's time on average is completely unheard of?
cardanome
You are missing that most services don't have high availability needs and don't need to scale.
Most projects I have worked on in my career have never seen more than a hundred concurrent users. If something goes down on Saturday, I am going to fix it on Monday.
I have worked on internal tools were I just added a postgres DB to the docker setup and that was it. 5 Minute of work and no issues at all. Sure if you have something customer facing, you need to do a bit more and setup a good backup strategy but that really isn't magic.
anal_reactor
The discussion isn't "what is more effective". The discussion is "who wants to be blamed in case things go south". If you push the decision to move to self-hosted and then one of the engineers fucks up the database, you have a serious problem. If same engineer fucks up cloud database, it's easier to save your own ass.
convolvatron
its not. I've been in a few shops that use RDS because they think their time is better spend doing other things.
except now they are stuck trying to maintain and debug Postgres without having the same visibility and agency that they would if they hosted it themselves. situation isn't at all clear.
Nextgrid
One thing unaccounted for if you've only ever used cloud-hosted DBs is just how slow they are compared to a modern server with NVME storage.
This leads the developers to do all kinds of workarounds and reach for more cloud services (and then integrating them and - often poorly - ensuring consistency across them) because the cloud hosted DB is not able to handle the load.
On bare-metal, you can go a very long way with just throwing everything at Postgres and calling it a day.
molf
Interesting. Is this an issue with RDS?
I use Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL and it's been rock solid. No issues; troubleshooting works fine; all extensions we need already installed; can adjust settings where needed.
convolvatron
its more of a general condition - its not that RDS is somehow really faulty, its just that when things do go wrong, its not really anybody's job to introspect the system because RDS is taking care of it for us.
in the limit I dont think we should need DBAs, but as long as we need to manage indices by hand, think more than 10 seconds about the hot queries, manage replication, tune the vacuumer, track updates, and all the other rot - then actually installing PG on a node of your choice is really the smallest of problems you face.
ZeroConcerns
So, yeah, I guess there's much confusion about what a 'managed database' actually is? Because for me, the table stakes are:
-Backups: the provider will push a full generic disaster-recovery backup of my database to an off-provider location at least daily, without the need for a maintenance window
-Optimization: index maintenance and storage optimization are performed automatically and transparently
-Multi-datacenter failover: my database will remain available even if part(s) of my provider are down, with a minimal data loss window (like, 30 seconds, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, depending on SLA and thus plan expenditure)
-Point-in-time backups are performed at an SLA-defined granularity and with a similar retention window, allowing me to access snapshots via a custom DSN, not affecting production access or performance in any way
-Slow-query analysis: notifying me of relevant performance bottlenecks before they bring down production
-Storage analysis: my plan allows for #GB of fast storage, #TB of slow storage: let me know when I'm forecast to run out of either in the next 3 billing cycles or so
Because, well, if anyone provides all of that for a monthly fee, the whole "self-hosting" argument goes out of the window quickly, right? And I say that as someone who absolutely adores self-hosting...
thedougd
It's even worse when you start finding you're staffing specialized skills. You have the Postgres person, and they're not quite busy enough, but nobody else wants to do what they do. But then you have an issue while they're on vacation, and that's a problem. Now I have a critical service but with a bus factor problem. So now I staff two people who are now not very busy at all. One is a bit ambitious and is tired of being bored. So he's decided we need to implement something new in our Postgres to solve a problem we don't really have. Uh oh, it doesn't work so well, the two spend the next six months trying to work out the kinks with mixed success.
satvikpendem
This would be a strange scenario because why would you keep these people employed? If someone doesn't want to do the job required, including servicing Postgres, then they wouldn't be with me any longer, I'll find someone who does.
arcbyte
Slack is a necessary component in well functioning systems.
zbentley
And rental/SaaS models often provide an extremely cost effective alternative to needing to have a lot of slack.
Corollary: rental/SaaS models provide that property in large part because their providers have lots of slack.
thedougd
Of course! It should be included in the math when comparing in-housing Postgres vs using a managed service.
marcosdumay
IMO, the reason to self-host your database is latency.
Yes, I'd say backups and analysis are table stakes for hiring it, and multi-datacenter failover is a relevant nice to have. But the reason to do it yourself is because it's literally impossible to get anything as good as you can build in somebody's else computer.
odie5533
Self-host things the boss won't call at 3 AM about: logs, traces, exceptions, internal apps, analytics. Don't self-host the database or major services.
satvikpendem
If you set it up right, you can automate all this as well by self hosting. There is really nothing special about automating backups or multi region fail over.
wahnfrieden
Yugabyte open source covers a lot of this
lbrito
I'm probably just an idiot, but I ran unmanaged postgres on Fly.io, which is basically self hosting on a vm, and it wasn't fun.
I did this for just under two years, and I've lost count of how many times one or more of the nodes went down and I had to manually deregister it from the cluster with repmgr, clone a new vm and promote a healthy node to primary. I ended up writing an internal wiki page with the steps. I never got it: if one of the purposes of clusters is having higher availability, why did repmgr not handle zombie primaries?
Again, I'm probably just an idiot out of my depth with this. And I probably didn't need a cluster anyway, although with the nodes failing like they did, I didn't feel comfortable moving to a single node setup as well.
I eventually switched to managed postgres, and it's amazing being able to file a sev1 for someone else to handle when things go down, instead of the responsibility being on me.
indigodaddy
Assuming you are using fly's managed postgres now?
kachapopopow
since this is on the front page (again?) I guess I'll chime in: learn kubernetes - it's worth it. It did take me 3 attempts at it to finally wrap my head around it I really suggest trying out many different things and see what works for you.
And I really recommend starting with *default* k3s, do not look at any alternatives to cni, csi, networked storage - treat your first cluster as something that can spontaniously fail and don't bother keeping it clean learn as much as you can.
Once you have that, you can use great open-source k8s native controllers which take care of vast majority of requirements when it comes to self-hosting and save more time in the long run than it took to set up and learn these things.
Honerable mentions: k9s, lens(I do not suggest using it in the long-term, but UI is really good as a starting point), rancher webui.
PostgreSQL specifically: https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/cloudnative-pg If you really want networked storage: https://github.com/longhorn/longhorn
I do not recommend ceph unless you are okay with not using shared filesystems as they have a bunch of gotchas or if you want S3 without having to install a dedicated deployment for it.
ninkendo
At $WORK we’ve been using the Zalando Postgres kubernetes operator to great success: https://github.com/zalando/postgres-operator
As someone who has operated Postgres clusters for over a decade before k8s was even a thing, I fully recommend just using a Postgres operator like this one and moving on. The out of box config is sane, it’s easy to override things, and failover/etc has been working flawlessly for years. It’s just the right line between total DIY and the simplicity of having a hosted solution. Postgres is solved, next problem.
satvikpendem
Check out canine.sh, it's to Kubernetes what Coolify or Dokploy is to Docker, if you're familiar with self hosted open source PaaS.
chuckadams
And on a similar naming note yet totally unrelated, check out k9s, which is a TUI for Kubernetes cluster admin. All kinds of nifty features built-in, and highly customizable.
satvikpendem
If we're talking about CLIs, check out Kamal, the build system that 37signals / Basecamp / DHH developed, specifically to move off the cloud. I think it uses Kubernetes but not positive, it might just be Docker.
kachapopopow
I just push to git where there is a git action to automatically synchronize deployments
chandureddyvari
Any good recommendations you got for learning kubernetes for busy people?
donatj
The author brings up the point, but I have always found surprising how much more expensive managed databases are than a comparable VPS.
I would expect a little bit more as a cost of the convenience, but in my experience it's generally multiple times the expense. It's wild.
This has kept me away from managed databases in all but my largest projects.
orev
Once they convince you that you can’t do it yourself, you end up relying on them, but didn’t develop the skills you would need to migrate to another provider when they start raising prices. And they keep raising prices because by then you have no choice.
zbentley
There is plenty of provider markup, to be sure. But it is also very much not a given that the hosted version of a database is running software/configs that are equivalent to what you could do yourself. Many hosted databases are extremely different behind the scenes when it comes to durability, monitoring, failover, storage provisioning, compute provisioning, and more. Just because it acts like a connection hanging off a postmaster service running on a server doesn’t mean that’s what your “psql” is connected to on RDS Aurora (or many of the other cloud-Postgres offerings).
aranelsurion
> Just because it acts like a connection hanging off
If anything that’s a feature for ease of use and compatibility.
ch2026
Wait, are you talking about cloud providers or LLMs?
citizenpaul
I have not tested this in real life yet but it seems like all the argument about vendor lock in can be solved, if you bite the bullet and learn basic Kubernetes administration. Kubernetes is FOSS and there are countless Kubernetes as a service providers.
I know there are other issues with Kubernetes but at least its transferable knowledge.
alexfromapex
Just don't try to build it from source haha. Compiling Postgres 18 with the PostGIS extension has been such a PITA because the topology component won't configure to not use the system /usr/bin/postgres and has given me a lot of grief. Finally got it fixed I think though.
isuckatcoding
Take a look at https://github.com/vitabaks/autobase
In case you want to self host but also have something that takes care of all that extra work for you
satvikpendem
I wonder how well this plays with other self hosted open source PaaS, is it just a Docker container we can run I assume?
runako
Thank you, this looks awesome.
markstos
I hosted PostgreSQL professionally for over a decade.
Overall, a good experience. Very stable service and when performance issues did periodically arise, I like that we had full access to all details to understand the root cause and tune details.
Nobody was employeed as a full-time DBA. We had plenty of other things going on in addition to running PostgreSQL.
jurschreuder
I moved from AWS RDS to ScaleWay RDS, had the same effect on cost
petterroea
I have ran (read: helped with infrastructure) a small production service using PSQL for 6 years, with up to hundreds of users per day. PSQL has been the problem exactly once, and it was because we ran out of disk space. Proper monitoring (duh) and a little VACUUM would have solved it.
Later I ran a v2 of that service on k8s. The architecture also changed a lot, hosting many smaller servers sharing the same psql server(Not really microservice-related, think more "collective of smaller services ran by different people"). I have hit some issues relating to maxing out the max connections, but that's about it.
This is something I do on my free time so SLA isn't an issue, meaning I've had the ability to learn the ropes of running PSQL without many bad consequences. I'm really happy I have had this opportunity.
My conclusion is that running PSQL is totally fine if you just set up proper monitoring. If you are an engineer that works with infrastructure, even just because nobody else can/wants to, hosting PSQL is probably fine for you. Just RTFM.
Self-hosting is more a question of responsibility I'd say. I am running a couple of SaaS products and self-host at much better performance at a fraction of the cost of running this on AWS. It's amazing and it works perfectly fine.
For client projects, however, I always try and sell them on paying the AWS fees, simply because it shifts the responsibility of the hardware being "up" to someone else. It does not inherently solve the downtime problem, but it allows me to say, "we'll have to wait until they've sorted this out, Ikea and Disney are down, too."
Doesn't always work like that and isn't always a tried-and-true excuse, but generally lets me sleep much better at night.
With limited budgets, however, it's hard to accept the cost of RDS (and we're talking with at least one staging environment) when comparing it to a very tight 3-node Galera cluster running on Hetzner at barely a couple of bucks a month.
Or Cloudflare, titan at the front, being down again today and the past two days (intermittently) after also being down a few weeks ago and earlier this year as well. Also had SQS queues time out several times this week, they picked up again shortly, but it's not like those things ...never happen on managed environments. They happen quite a bit.