You're right, but I know of a few startup teams that chose Linode, Rackspace etc. at start to account for future 'scalability' concerns. Well the number of user

You're right, but I know of a few startup teams that chose Linode, Rackspace etc. at start to account for future 'scalability' concerns. Well the number of users never came and they spent a lot of time just configuring stuff. Of course I have also seen teams that couldn't build a decent business on AWS. I think the net cost of an extra personnel (a server admin) in a startup team, is more than the cost of the server.