Let me answer to this properly:

1. We have interest in Open source in general, not only Fediverse even if we also support Mastodon, Friendica, PeerTube, Gitea and also soon KBIN and Pixelfed
2. We contribute in code to some projects, and we also give back part of our revenues to open source authors partnering with us
3. There is NO lock-in, at any time customers can download a full backup and run their stack anywhere else
4. We (human support team) have no access to customers servers unless customers give us the permission and share access with us for investigation

I think this kind of handwringing shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how the internet works.

Everything you've ever pushed your eyeballs against on the internet was hosted somewhere. These days its pretty much all in the cloud.

All this team did was write a wrapper to automate the instance creation, which I just happily paid for, because even though I could have figured it out, it wasnt work several hours of my time to do so. And if I did, I still was going to use the same cloud providers this team is routing through.

I just paid to host an instance to do my part to support the fediverse. If you are from the elest team jbenguira hit me up or maybe I'll hit your lemmy to get some help. Having some issues getting my domain to work and want to make sure I'm doing it right.

I'm waiting for the personal version, self-host your Lemmy experience for 2€ a month. Although maybe that would cause some issues with getting federated? Would any instances you want to look at have to accept you?

Some people prefer to pay a small amount to a third party so they can sleep better knowing that experts are taking care of maintenance for them.

Origin of Elestio: we started deploying open-source software for websites and web apps we built, many for SMB and enterprise customers. Our process was basically: spin up VM's from a hosting provider, install the software we needed, then update it manually / when it was needed / critical, etc.

Once we hit > 100 servers/services needing updates, backups, capacity monitoring and alerting, etc. we saw that it was getting totally unmanageable… so we built what would eventually become Elestio.

Managed databases is a solved problem (AWS RDS, Aiven, Scalegrid), but what about other open-source software? Marketplaces have apps templates for one-click deployments, but once deployed you need expensive devOps to properly maintain your software.

Elestio provides enterprise-grade, fully managed services for 200+ open-source softwares. 100x cheaper than using human devOps, 10x more effective

We are helping startups & enterprises from 16 countries to deploy/secure/maintain open source softwares at scale (some customers have hundreds of managed services with us), we are saving them tons of time and money by managing that for them.

I assume they run upgrades and backups?