It is eternally surprising to me how much "hosted X" businesses can make. There are a lot of non-technical people ready to overspend by 10x just to have someone else be "responsible" for downtime.

I do this all day long to avoid being the person in the hot seat when something breaks… when it’s someone else’s money, and when the org’s dysfunctional or political enough for there to be a “hot seat” (nearly all large and medium orgs, at least half of small orgs).

It’s kinda comical because it’s absolutely a principal-agent problem disguised as being in the best interest of the company. 10x costs and in practice worse uptime & performance for internal-political insurance and on-call avoidance for me personally, sold with a list of benefits that the company either doesn’t need, or that only look like benefits due to very-partial accounting, or that have such lengthy footnoted caveats that no, they probably won’t be a benefit in-fact.

DHH was talking about this in his recent rails world keynote. Hosting companies are getting huge margins because developers are afraid of using a computer.

Just look at Microsoft 365 and to lesser extent AWS.