# Leave the cloud with a fallback, not a farewell

- Category: business
- Author: Mihai Negrea (https://indie.md/people/mihai-negrea/)
- Source: https://indie.md/events/indie-tm-12-timisoara-july-2026/
- Canonical URL: https://indie.md/advice/build-a-fallback-before-you-leave-the-cloud/

DataDriven's infrastructure now lives on Hetzner dedicated servers and an office GPU, but Mihai kept an escape hatch in the other direction: when his local hardware has downtime, backend tasks overflow to Azure Batch Low Priority instances for a few hours at modest cost, and a Starlink connection is under consideration as network fallback. That design is what makes self-hosting responsible instead of reckless for a company of one. The cloud's real product was never compute, it was the promise that failures are someone else's pager, and when you take that back you must replace it with something: an overflow path, a degraded mode, a documented recovery. Price the fallback into the migration math from the start, because the savings of leaving the cloud are only real if one hardware failure cannot take the product down for a week.