A month or so ago, I was setting up a new system for writing internal-ish documentation and made the rather unpopular decision to not go with Gitbook because it was too reliant on their servers for my taste. Today, I got to send a very satisfying "told you so" the the team chat. To be clear, I think the Gitbook team actually handled this very well and it wasn't their fault, but it does illustrate very clearly why we…
* Fewer security and compliance hurdles when its on our own infra.
* Perfect uptime because it’s our responsibility. (Not saying we’re better but outages are our fault and don’t make you look bad)
* Fewer hurdles when integrating LDAP and friends. There’s no need for the weird “connectors” that companies come up with.
* We’ll pay you more for the privilege of hosting it ourselves.
* Giving us access to the code in a shared source model buys you an extreme amount of lock-in since once we start tweaking our fork for our needs we’re not leaving.
* The support burden is higher, sure but if it’s your most expensive enterprise tier you’ll almost always be working with a professional IT team.
* We’re the easiest crowd to up sell and we’ll even pay you to develop features you can sell to other people.
I don’t want to make it seem like selling in enterprise isn’t a slog but it’s a good business to be in.