Hosted (BC) vs self-hosted (Magento) — what’s the risk profile?

BigCommerce: BC handles infrastructure, security patching, uptime, Black-Friday scaling, PCI scope. Risk shifts to vendor risk — pricing changes, deprecations, feature ceilings you can’t code around. Outages are BC’s problem (and rare).

Magento self-hosted: you own infrastructure risk. Hosting + DevOps + security patching + WAF + Black-Friday scaling + PCI compliance scope are on you (or your hosting partner). Upside: no platform risk, no surprise pricing shifts, no “feature deprecated next quarter”.

Adobe Commerce Cloud: middle ground. Adobe handles infra (mostly), you handle code. More expensive ($30k+/yr); fewer DevOps headaches.

For a 5-person ecom team without DevOps capacity, BC is the lower-risk choice. For a 20+ person team with engineers, Magento is sustainable.