Really? You'd be hard pressed to own all of your own infrastructure if you're Techcrunch, especially for anything approaching the cost of the Wordpress VIP thi

Really? You'd be hard pressed to own all of your own infrastructure if you're Techcrunch, especially for anything approaching the cost of the Wordpress VIP thing (or even Rackspace Cloud for that matter). You know that lovely self managed server in the carrier neutral datacenter? It's still going to go down when power in one of the datacenter's grids fail and their backup generators don't come on properly. The network's still going to fail when someone screws up a config and routes your traffic improperly. Once you own it all, you're still banking on the fact that you can do a better job than some company that specializes in what you're trying to do. You'd be quite a bit better off sticking with some "cloud" provider and putting up a static failover cache on EC2 or something. Even then you're at the mercy of your DNS provider (unless you're going to run your own anycasted DNS) and any misbehaving DNS caches.