Because we've been led to believe that hosting any kind of database yourself is an enormous challenge and unsafe and not-cloud-nativie-enough and god bless you if even for an instant you believe you have enough knowledge to run such complicated pieces of software that are harder to get right than rocket science.

At least that's what the cloud vendors want you to believe.

As a person from both devops and SWE worlds, it all comes down to "do you already know how." If you know how already, it's the way to go for sure. If you don't, the extra money to outsource it will enable you to focus on adding value elsewhere.

Now that said there's definitely a cultural belief in startups that you should outsource everything you can. It works for some people, but I've seen it kill others because they were sending all of their revenue to their vendors. The outsource model always suffers as you scale up.

> do basic due diligence wrt security (lock down ssh, firewall, etc.)

This is exactly the benefit. You don't have to do any of this stuff. For example, my organisation has two developers neither of which are experts in network security or system administration. So if can outsource this work to a 3rd party provider then that's a huge benefit. The difference in cost between a $5/month DO droplet and a $10/month managed Redis instance is negligible for us.

Render is a platform as a service type offering like Heroku. Folks interested in self-hosting aren't the target audience for this.

Yes, and the convenience of not needing to know how to maintain the server. You can point a person with a different type of experience at this problem.

Correct — the benefit is that I don’t have to know or care about your second paragraph.

DigitalOcean also offers managed Redis