Let me empathize but say, to put it bluntly, they do not have qualified IT Staff. They have 1 or 2 people who understand only basic web server stuff and nothing else. Thus the two week outage.

Paying LearnWorlds + Shopify $30K a year, if it were even that extreme, is cheaper than an engineer and certainly cheaper than an outage over Giving Tuesday, as they found out the hard way. They got hacked and were down for the most high-traffic nonprofit donor day of the year in their effort to save a few bucks. It wasn’t even the plugins, but the instance underlying the shared hosting.

> It's literally always the same. They get you running in no time, and in no time you're locked into their ecosystem: No customization if they don't want it; pricing won't scale and just randomly changes without any justification; if you do something they don't like they'll just shut you down.

You’re also locked into an ecosystem. It’s called Stripe or PayPal. Almost all of that applies anyway. Don’t forget that significant amount of customizations are restricted to streamline PCI compliance, you can do illegal things very easily. Install an analytics script that accidentally captures their credit card numbers, and suddenly you’re in hot water.

> Leading to huge dependencies, vendor lock ins, monopolies, price gauging

Have you analyzed how many dependencies are in your self hosted projects? What happens to them if maintainers retire? How long did it take your self hosted projects to resolve the 10/10 CVE in NextJS? And as for price gouging, if it’s cheaper than an engineer to properly support a self-hosted solution, I’ll still make that trade as even $80K for software is cheaper than $120K to support it. If you’re at the scale where you don’t have a proper engineer to manage it, do not self host. Business downtime is always more expensive than software (in this case, 5 salaries for 2 weeks to do absolutely nothing + lost donations + reputational damage + customer damages, because “self hosting is easy and cheaper”).