Hosting — managed Shopify vs self-hosted Magento — risk profile?

Honest framing:

Shopify (managed SaaS): 99.99% uptime SLA, auto-scaling for Black-Friday traffic, no DevOps work. Risk: if Shopify de-prioritises a feature you depend on (e.g. Audiences, Linkpop) it disappears with little notice. You can’t pin versions. Major checkout changes are pushed to all stores simultaneously.

Magento Open Source self-hosted: you own the stack — pick hosting (Cloudways, AWS, Hetzner), pick PHP version, pin Magento version, schedule upgrades when you want. Risk: you own incidents (DDoS, hosting outage, bot attacks, OS upgrades). Need either a competent dev or a $1.5k–$5k/mo retainer to keep it patched. Magento security patches must be applied within 30 days or you risk the Magecart-class breaches.

Adobe Commerce Cloud sits between: managed but pricey ($60k+/yr), with the platform-control of Magento but offloaded ops.

Pick Shopify if you don’t want to think about ops. Pick Magento Open Source if you have a dev team or retainer and value control. Pick ACC if you want managed Magento and have $60k/yr to spare.