Including falling back to third-party hosting when relevant. One doesn't exclude the other
My experience with self hosting has been that, at least when you keep the services independent, downtime is not more common than in hosted environments, and you always know what's going on. Customising solutions, or workarounds in case of trouble, is a benefit you don't get when the service provider is significantly bigger than you are. It has pros and cons and also depends on the product (e.g. email delivery is harder than Mattermost message delivery, or if you need a certain service only once a year or so) but if you have the personell capacity and a continuous need, I find hosting things oneself to be the best solution in general
Including fallback to your laptop if nothing else works. I saved a demo once by just running the whole thing from my computer when the Kubernetes guys couldn't figure out why the deployed version was 403'ing. Just had to poke the touchpad every so often so it didn't go to sleep.
> Just had to poke the touchpad every so often so it didn't go to sleep
Unwarranted tip: next time, if you use macOS, just open the terminal and run `caffeinate -imdsu`.
I assume Linux/Windows have something similar built-in (and if not built-in, something that's easily available). For Windows, I know that PowerToys suite of nifty tools (officially provided by Microsoft) has Awake util, but that's just one of many similar options.
You can just turn of automatic sleep/screen off in Windows native power settings.