Here&#x27;s my pet theory. In the early 2000s and earlier, web apps used to be hard to build. No Bootstrap, WordPress, Rails, Django, Laravel, jQuery, etc. A few years later, they became much easier to build but operating them (scaling, backups, availability, etc.) was still a pain in the ass and expensive. This promoted the rise of SaaS.<p>Now that we have a rising new generation of tools that aim to solve the operations side of things (Docker, Kubernetes, Deis, OpenShift, Mesos, etc.), it&#x27;ll be interesting to see where things move up in the value chain. I could see a come back to &quot;self hosting&quot; big time if those new tools make it dead easy to &quot;install and forget&quot; your own Mandrill&#x2F;Clearbit&#x2F;Contentful&#x2F;Twilio&#x2F;etc.