I am considering the pros and cons of moving an app from Sashido to something self-hosted at i.e. Heroku or some other hosting platform. Would love to hear what the community see as pros and cons with moving vs staying with Sashido.
Thanks!
Claes
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For me biggest pro is everything is under my control. But this also leads a con which is i have to manage everything. Self hosting is also cheaper in long run. Also sashido doesn’t support latest parse servers. İ guess latest version they support is 3.6.0 which is older. You can’t take advantage of latest parse server features like file triggers which introduced in version 4.2.0
Self Hosted
Pros:
- Everything is under your control.
- Cheaper in long run especially if your app will serve many people.
Cons: - You have to manage everything.
Yes you have to manage everything but when I do stress test against my servers, parse server doesn’t crash except if there isn’t enough ram. When available ram is zero, parse will crash. But this also depends on your usage. Parse generally uses little ram. Ram only got full if you are fetching over 100.000 parse object. And even for 100k objects 1.5gb ram will be more than enough. For few hundred objects ram will not be an issue.
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Thanks a lot for your input! Much appreciated 
That is a great question and it means embarking on an exciting journey full of new discoveries.
This autodidact crash course will teach you to look at your app from many new angles. You will take new considerations into account that will help you build a more efficient, secure and resilient app. You will learn a lot about topics you may have never heard of or which you only knew by name.
Generally, you will likely encounter challenges of the following categories when moving from a hosted provider to self-hosting (provider agnostic):
Concept
- Some of your current approaches may become unfeasible or inefficient. You may need additional services that come included with a hosted provider. For example, you may need to look for a CDN provider to cost-effectively serve content to clients, something your hosted provider may have done for you in the background.
Migration
- If you want to migrate a live app, you will benefit from a migration plan that allows you to plan transitioning the database data, any storage content, APIs, DNS entries, client connection URL, etc. It is usually beneficial to test this out with a sample environment and plan safe points you can return to if you need to abort the migration.
Costs
- The maybe most often encountered surprise: Make sure you fully understand the new cost structure when self-hosting. You may suddenly be billed separately for things like log storage, DNS queries, and load balancer traffic. It is nothing that you didn’t already pay before in an all-inclusive pricing model, but suddenly a minor configuration change can mean a significant change in cost. To manage that, you are provided with a detailed billing dashboard that allows you to break down costs on a per-component basis.
- Support packages may suddenly become a separate cost point. While hosted providers often include basic support as part of your flat-rate, this is usually not the case with cloud service providers.
Scaling
- While a hosted solution gives you just a handful of scaling sliders, you suddenly have to consider scaling separately for every component in your entire architecture. That means you will develop a more differentiated understanding of scaling as you go along. This will allow you to optimize and provision your components exactly as you need them and give you additional cost saving opportunities.
Security
- You will have to secure the architecture components yourself. Especially if you consider migrating an existing live app, that is something to pay attention to from the start, otherwise you may create vulnerabilities that you may not notice until it’s too late.
- Security means not just protecting against data theft or service interruption, but also protecting your environment from unexpected costs. For example, a DDoS attack will suddenly not just mean that your service is impacted, but your bill can go up into the thousands. This risk is usually carried by the hosted provider, but cloud service provider usually explicitly shift the risk to you. You are billed for your resources, regardless of who or what is using them. Some cloud service providers even offer some sort of insurance package against these risks, but you could also look for external insurance cover.
Time
- You will need to invest time to learn as you go. You will go from mainly worrying about your business logic to worrying about many new aspects and topics that you may not have encountered previously.
If this sounds like a lot, it should not discourage you. Quite the contrary, the time and effort you invest will be worthwhile through the knowledge and competence you acquire. You will never look at an app the same way as before.
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