The team i worked with hosted simple solutions on VMs at first. But after a few years, the client requirements and features grew until our biggest problem became maintenance and upgrades.
The sysop costs became higher than our earnings, so we weighted our options of re-building or partner with a larger API-first solution.
Eventually we choose to partner up and in the end, we cut costs to a fraction, while still keeping the customer base and increasing performance.
Which is another point I see constantly, founders desperately want to keep control by not outsourcing when it _should_ be, and by doing that, the costs continue to increase and the already over-worked team can no longer push features, competition gain even more ground, margins fall even more and eventually layoffs and inevitable shut-down.
Good points. It should still be mentioned that moving away from VMs to API-first solution or outsourcing maintenance only happened after the company grew and was successful, not before the MVP was ready.
The sysop costs became higher than our earnings, so we weighted our options of re-building or partner with a larger API-first solution.
Eventually we choose to partner up and in the end, we cut costs to a fraction, while still keeping the customer base and increasing performance.
Which is another point I see constantly, founders desperately want to keep control by not outsourcing when it _should_ be, and by doing that, the costs continue to increase and the already over-worked team can no longer push features, competition gain even more ground, margins fall even more and eventually layoffs and inevitable shut-down.