Self-hosting Postgres is so incredibly easy. People are under this strange spell that they need to use an ORM or always reach for SQLite when it’s trivially easy to write raw SQL. The syntax was designed so lithium’d out secretaries were able to write queries on a punchcard. Postgres has so many nice lil features.

I wish this post went into the actual how! He glossed over the details. There is a link to his repo, which is a start I suppose: https://github.com/piercefreeman/autopg

A blog post that went into the details would be awesome. I know Postgres has some docs for this (https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/backup.html), but it's too theoretical. I want to see a one-stop-shop with everything you'd reasonably need to know to self host: like monitoring uptime, backups, stuff like that.

Over time I've realized that the best abstraction for managing a computer is a computer.

I’ve been managing a 100+ GB PostgreSQL database for years. Each two years I upgrade the VPS for the size, and also the db and os version. The app is in the same VPS as the DB. A 2 hour window each two years is ok for the use case. No regrets.

I'd argue forget about Postgres completely. If you can shell out $90/month, the only database you should use is GCP Spanner (yes, this also means forget about any mega cloud other than GCP unless you're fine paying ingress and egress).

And for small projects, SQLite, rqlite, or etcd.

My logic is either the project is important enough that data durability matters to you and sees enough scale that loss of data durability would be a major pain in the ass to fix, or the project is not very big and you can tolerate some lost committed transactions.

A consensus-replication-less non-embedded database has no place in 2025.

This is assuming you have relational needs. For non-relational just use the native NoSQL in your cloud, e.g. DynamoDB in AWS.

I think a big piece missing from these conversations is compliance frameworks and customer trust. Of your selling to enterprise customers or governments, they want to go through your stack, networking, security, audit logs, and access controls with a fine toothed comb.

Everything you do that isn't "normal" is another conversation you need to have with an auditor plus each customer. Those eat up a bunch of time and deals take longer to close.

Right or wrong, these decisions make you less "serious" and therefore less credible in the eyes of many enterprise customers. You can get around that perception, but it takes work. Not hosting on one of the big 3 needs to be decided with that cost in mind

Looking at this list:

    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

Every company I've ever on boarded at, that hosted their own database, had number one, and a lot of TODOs around the rest. It's really hard! Honestly, it could be a full time job for a team. And that's more expensive than RDS.

I think we can get to the point where we have self-hosted agents that can manage db maintenance and recovery. There could be regular otel -> * -> Grafana -> ~PagerDuty -> you and TriageBot which would call specialists to gather state and orchestrate a response.

Scripts could kick off health reports and trigger operations. Upgrades and recovery runbooks would be clearly defined and integration tested.

It would empower personal sovereignty.

Someone should make this in the open. Maybe it already exists, there are a lot of interesting agentops projects.

If that worked 60% of the time and I had to figure out the rest, I’d self host that. I’d pay for 80%+.

I wish this article would have went more in-depth on how they're setting up backups. The great thing about sequel light is lightstream makes backup and restore something you don't really have to think about

I didnt even know there were companies that would host postgres for you. I self host it for my personal projects with 0 users and it works just fine, so I don't know why anyone would do it any differently.