> If you’re ok sharing things externally why self-host at all?

You're theoretically more in control of the data, which may be a legal requirement in certain jurisdictions and/or industries.

Due to the "TOLA" Australian law, all Atlassian products should be avoided if you care about being in control of the data.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/whats-actually-in-australias-e...

Atlassian is not HIPAA compliant, so many are forced to install their tools on on-prem.

Which is one of the reasons why Atlassians discontinuation of their server offering is so problematic. There's a number of smaller businesses which could use Atlassian Cloud, but between HIPAA, Schrems II and GDPR that's currently not possible, and the datacenter license is simply too expensive.

Exactly. Our customers do need to authenticate to read anything in our Confluence installation. Ideally there's nothing critical, just stuff which is considered private.

Legally many of our clients require that their data, all of it, secret or not, reside within the EU.

Currently cloud is not so hot, due to Schrems II. During the last six months we migrate a number of customers on-prem, and only one is building out their stuff in AWS.

Cost? Availability of oodles of storage? Integration with other on-prem systems (such as Active Directory) which maybe you don't want to directly expose by itself.

There's a fair few reasons other than this, it's not unthinkable to host servers yourself if you already have other servers on-prem anyway.

Because you’re only ok with sharing with your partners, not with a cloud provider.

Because it’s still cheaper than cloud, it’s still not putting your data on someone else’s servers, and it’s still not being beholden to the cloud provider’s planned and unplanned outages.