I host it myself
Renting your whole stack from a managed cloud is renting your own business. I run the portfolio on hardware I control, on purpose.
The default advice is to never touch a server. Use the managed platform, the managed database, the managed everything, and trade money for not thinking about it. For most people that is the right call. For a portfolio that I intend to own for a long time, it is a slow way to give the business away.
Renting the platform is renting the business
When the entire stack lives on someone else's managed service, they set the terms. The price, the limits, the deprecations, the sudden policy change that breaks your deploy on a Tuesday. You do not own the thing your company runs on. You rent it, and the rent goes up.
At one product, that is a convenience worth paying for. Across a portfolio, it is a tax on every company at once, plus a single point where someone else can change the rules on all of them.
What owning the stack actually buys
So I run the portfolio on infrastructure I control. The cost curve bends the right way as things grow instead of the wrong way. The data sits where I put it. Nobody can hold a deploy hostage, raise the rent on a whim, or quietly turn off the feature a product depends on.
It also forces a kind of honesty. When you own the box, you cannot hide behind a vendor. The system either works or it does not, and it is on you. That pressure makes the engineering better.
The tradeoff is real, and worth it
This is not free. Owning the stack means carrying the operations: backups, security, the night something breaks. I am not going to pretend that away. If you have one product and a small team, the managed path is probably correct and you should take it.
But the whole portfolio runs on one shared foundation, so the operations cost is paid once and amortized across every company on top of it. That is the same logic as everything else I build. Do the hard, boring, durable thing once, then let every venture inherit it.
Owning the thing you depend on
The pattern underneath all of this is simple. Own the things your business depends on. Your stack is one of them. Renting it back to yourself, forever, is a worse deal than the convenience makes it look.