Should your data be leaving your building at all?
Self-hosted platforms, deployment pipelines, mail, backups, and access control on hardware you own or rent directly. Often cheaper, always more answerable.
The problem
Cloud services solved one problem — nobody had to run servers — and created another: nobody knows where the data is, what it costs each month, or what happens when the provider changes its terms. Teams accumulate a dozen subscriptions, each holding a piece of the business, and the bill is only the visible part. The invisible part is that leaving becomes harder every year.
How we approach it
We start with an inventory: what runs where, what it costs, what data it holds, and what would break if it disappeared. Then we build a self-hosted platform sized for the actual load — usually one or two well-specified machines, a reverse proxy, a deployment pipeline, mail, monitoring, and backups that are tested by restoring them. Access is by keys and roles, not shared passwords. Where a hosted service genuinely earns its place, it stays; the point is that the choice is deliberate.
Worked example
Replacing eleven subscriptions with two servers
A design studio paid for eleven separate services: file sync, mail, a wiki, a password manager, project tracking, and more. The monthly cost was modest; the real problem was that a departing employee had owned three of the accounts. We consolidated onto two rented servers in an EU data centre: a platform stack with single sign-on, encrypted off-site backups restored monthly as a drill, and mail on their own domain. Total cost dropped by about 60%, and — the part they cared about — every account now belongs to the company. The one service kept was video conferencing, because self-hosting it would have cost more than it saved.
What you get
- An inventory of every service, its data, its cost, and its exit path
- A self-hosted platform with deployment pipeline, monitoring, and tested backups
- Access control by role, with no shared credentials anywhere
- Operating documentation and a maintenance plan you can follow or hand to us