Start with the operating constraints

Map regulatory, latency and data‑sharing rules before comparing prices. If customer data can’t leave a country, a hyperscaler region is irrelevant unless it has the right attestations.

Decision matrix

• Control & compliance

  Public cloud: Shared responsibility model; strong primitives but still requires audits and legal reviews for new regions.

  Self‑hosting: Full authority on residency and security layers, but you must operate the stack.

• Speed & elasticity

  Public cloud: Minutes to provision, every service exposed via API and IaC.

  Self‑hosting: Provisioning speed depends on your automation layer. With Greffon, most apps deploy in under a minute.

• Cost visibility

  Public cloud: Pay for what you use, but bills sprawl with egress/managed services.

  Self‑hosting: CapEx or reserved hardware, but predictable. Ops time is the main hidden cost.

Hybrid becomes the default

Platforms such as Greffon let you run collaboration suites, developer tools or analytics on your own hardware while tapping into public cloud for burst workloads.

When self‑hosting is the right call

• When data residency or sovereignty is non‑negotiable (public sector, EU health, newsroom archives).
• When network egress fees distort SaaS pricing versus owning the connection.
• When you already run edge or on‑prem compute for latency reasons and need the same UX as the cloud.
• When a single team needs to ship a collaborative or developer tool to dozens of sites without opening tickets.

How Greffon helps

Greffon turns any server into a “Greffer”: a managed target that receives apps from a curated store. Click deploy, choose the Greffer, let the orchestrator handle secrets, TLS and health checks.