Large buyers of software products often request self-hosted deployment, particularly enterprises in regulated industries. Serving these accounts can u

So you want to offer self-hosted deployment: how should you do it?

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2025-01-08 17:00:06

Large buyers of software products often request self-hosted deployment, particularly enterprises in regulated industries. Serving these accounts can unlock huge budgets for vendors, but in my experience it’s not easy to do. This post explores the decision of if you should offer a self-hosted deployment model, the key challenges and technical decisions you’ll encounter, and how you can overcome them.

I experienced this problem as co-founder of Context.ai, an LLM product analytics startup. We sold to large enterprises who often didn’t want to share their sensitive data with us, and these customers would ask to self-host our product to ensure their data remained private. After enough prospects asked, we did the work to offer self-hosted deployment - but it introduced many headaches. We now work with software vendors to help them tackle the challenge of deploying and maintaining their products in self-hosted environments.

Self-hosted deployments are defined by a vendor's software product running in a customer-controlled environment. The advantage of this is data security, as the vendor usually cannot access the deployment or the customer’s data. But this lack of access means management of the deployment must be completed by the customer rather than the vendor.