TL;DR As a solo entrepreneur I cannot manage a server myself. PaaS comes in as a life saver. Since I started hosting my apps on Google App Engine I saved time and money, but the best part is: my app is secure and scalable without having to lift a finger. Here is the longer story that made me quit dedicated servers for PaaS: Three years ago I was on vacation with my wife in Turkey. At the time I was running a lead management tool. One morning while my wife was dressing up I opened my laptop for a routine check on my dedicated server, And boom, server hacked and all files encrypted! I had two customers onboard, both running massive lead generation campaigns. Not only my day was ruined because I had to spend the whole day reinstalling the server, but the 24h downtime made me look like a fool to my customers. End of the day, my whole vacation was ruined. This episode made me take a radical decision: I will never host my applications on a server instance again (think EC2). I simply cant outsmart hackers. So I started looking for alternatives. That's when I re-discovered PaaS. I remember a few years ago having played around with Google App Engine, but never took it seriously. Now that I had a real professional app to host, the promise of PaaS seemed suddenly very tempting. I gave it a try, read the docs, and in 1 day I was able to get a first version of my app to run on GAE. Not all features where working yet, but I was ecstatic already. Fast forward, today I cant imagine working without GAE. It's like all of Google is working for me to host secure and scale . Azure and AWS have similar offers, that I didn't really check, but I am sure they provide the same value as GAE. my apps Security and scalability or only some of the features that PaaS offers out of the box. So if you are like me, a solo engineer or even a small team still hosting your app on server instances, I bet its only a matter of time until you switch to PaaS. You'd better start right now. Disclaimer: I have no affiliation to Google or any other platform. Just sharing my experience as a happy user.
