I would choose self-hosting for small to medium size teams any day. I can't fathom why people choose not to self-host at this scale. Your data. Your control. Your network. Your infrastructure. Your responsibility. Are people becoming more afraid of responsibility these days?
Small to medium size teams should be hyper-focused on developing their product and bringing in customers and revenue. Spending time on commoditized infrastructure is only a good idea if that saves time in the short to medium term.
But hey, with the number of outages GitHub has recently that break even point is coming closer and closer.
> Your control. Your network. Your infrastructure. Your responsibility
These are all the reasons why I don't want to self-host my own git. I can live with it being down every now and then. And when it is down, I don't want it to be my job to fix it. I've got more important stuff to worry about.
> Are people becoming more afraid of responsibility these days?
I wound't say people become more afraid, they just don't see the reason to bother. I'd choose GitHub or Gitlab for small teams at any time. I'd probably even be fine with the free versions.
I see little to no reason for self-hosting in a small team. I cannot imagine a performant server, bandwith and the employee it takes to maintain it to be cheaper than the 10€/month/user for a hosted solution.
From zero servers to one requires an employee with the skills, but from 100 to 101 (my situation) does not. It requires less than 1% more employee, since more is likely to be automated etc.
Many small companies already have VMs running other services.
> I cannot imagine a performant server, bandwith and the employee it takes to maintain it to be cheaper than the 10€/month/user for a hosted solution.
Gitlab and gitea don't have that high performance requirements, especially when you consider how absurdly cheap high-core-count CPUs, RAM and NVMe SSDs are these days… and that's assuming you don't just chuck it into your existing cloud infrastructure and call it a day.
But even self-hosted redundant gitlab setups for several hundred users can be done with cheap commodity servers (or dedicated hosting providers like Hetzner) for <5€/user/month, and maintenance is on the order of 1-2 hours per month.
it's literally a money sink for wishy-washy benefits if you're a small/medium sized team. It's why heroku became a billion dollar company, time+money is better spent elsewhere at the start.
Self hosting quickly becomes a mess of weird gatekeeping and bad maintenance. Almost never have I seed well maintained self hosted infrastructure. Most of the time it is installed, gatekept and then left to bitrot without any upgrades or maintenance.
