Are Self-Hosted Forums and Blogs Becoming Obsolete with Cloud Platforms and SaaS Communities?

[Shawn Gossman]

Or at least, is this going to be the future?

I could eventually see XenForo, vBulletin, and Invision going into full SaaS platform mode. You either host it on their cloud or you go somewhere else.

What do you all think? Are the days of self-hosting coming to an end because of the rise of SaaS?

 

[Cedric]

They are most definitely a declining thing. And honestly, being an Invision Cloud customer, you can't believe how relieving it is not to worry about anything backend.

 

[frm]

It really depends on the size of the forum and the experience of the new admins.

I've worked for two Big Boards, and they would never go SaaS as they had a tech team of their own to do server maintenance to, in one instance, practically rewriting XF 1.5 to perform the best that it could, code-wise, and with server optimization to milk every last bit of performance out of 1.5 before EoL (we're talking millions of posts and millions of members).

I can't speak for them now, but signing up for a SaaS at $299 (I think that's XF's top-tier business plan) would be cheap compared to what they pay staff, but they couldn't get the immediate attention they need with SaaS unless they had a dedicated Corporate/Enterprise plan with someone available 24/7 to do something, which a tech team or dedicated sysadmin/developer can do, and is still within budget to profit from.

A Big Board will likely want full control and migrate away from anything that forces SaaS, as it also opens them up to liabilities, i.e., inadvertently sharing data that could be compromised by a 3rd party, making them liable regardless.

So, there will always be self-hosted, in my opinion, it's just whether that self-hosting will cost more than SaaS as the customer bases switch, like smaller forums going to SaaS while Big Boards need to remain on their secure stacks/own code base that they've poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into over the past decades.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

So, there will always be self-hosted, in my opinion, it's just whether that self-hosting will cost more than SaaS as the customer bases switch, like smaller forums going to SaaS while Big Boards need to remain on their secure stacks/own code base that they've poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into over the past decades.

While you're probably right, what I fear is that more people will turn to SaaS platforms and less will use self-hosting.

We know what that will mean:

SaaS pricing will go down and it will be highly competitive because everyone is using them. Self-hosting services will have less people using them and therefore will have to raise their prices because servers don't pay for themselves. We might lose a lot of the hosting services and get stuck with a few really expensive ones.

That's my prediction. I hope I'm wrong.