When you're starting out, your service can, quite frankly, be down for an entire day and it won't kill you. Once you've got enough traction that downtime could

When you're starting out, your service can, quite frankly, be down for an entire day and it won't kill you. Once you've got enough traction that downtime could be a money-losing issue, you can step up. But let's be realistic. Plenty of real businesses host their public site from their own office. At least, several of the startups I've worked for have their own server closet. Many of them don't have redundant internet connection nor redundant power. It's OK to be a little bit flaky. Look at the poster-child for flakiness (some microblogging service that seems to be popular among, well, everybody), and you'll notice it's still pretty successful even with it's weekly tech-blog-worth downtime. Your average little startup probably doesn't need five nines from the word go. What it does need, though, is a backend setup that only costs $50/month. Hosting from your home-office will give you that.