I can largely agree with the last statement. The problem I find with the hosted services is that people just tend to throw data at it without really knowing anything about cluster/node/shard performance. This typically blows up in their face at some point and even though Elastic Cloud has nice sliders in place for spend-more-money, they still have to go through the rebalancing pains (if they didn't write-lock the cluster outright). That should never happen.

If you have strictly time-series data and are willing to make compromises around retention window, hosted elasticsearch is an easy conclusion. Invariably though, I find that where performance is a real concern, you have to carefully plan what data you're indexing and that requires operations knowledge around elasticsearch. At that point you almost might as well host it yourself anyway.

Also if X-Pack was something I _had_ to have, and tbh there are free alternatives for all of its good features, I would consider Elastic Cloud.

I'm even a customer of theirs on some clusters, but lackluster support and pushy upselling experiences have made me want to move out of it.