What the GP describes is still more that possible. I happen to have some physical hosts in a data center, but you can have the same effect with a Linode VM. It

What the GP describes is still more that possible. I happen to have some physical hosts in a data center, but you can have the same effect with a Linode VM. It is massively convenient to run your own server. But you need to know how to maintain it (or be willing to learn). It isn't that hard, depending on what you're doing, but there's some effort and learning if you don't do this for a living. Well worth it, at least for me.