Quick question for those of you who run your own servers. I have been hosting a small VC:MP server with a couple of plugins on a cheap VPS for about a year, and now the same question comes up at work: pay per seat for a hosted tool, or run the open source version on a box you control?
I wrote down what I spend on the VC:MP box (VPS, backups, a bit of my time for updates) and tried to compare it with a hosted alternative. The most useful thing I found while doing that was SaaS vs self-hosted costs (https://vcusers.org/), because it lists the costs people usually forget: backups, monitoring, security patches and the hours spent when something breaks on a weekend.
My own numbers so far: the server itself is cheap, but the time is not. Every plugin update means checking the config again, and twice I lost a day because a restart script failed quietly. On the other hand I like having the logs and the database in my own hands, and nobody can change the pricing under me.
How do you handle it? Do you keep everything on one VPS with a simple backup script, or do you split the game server and the web stuff? And has anyone moved a community back to a hosted setup after getting tired of the maintenance?