I think hiring dedicated servers or VPS is a nice middle ground between self hosting and all out "cloud" cough lock-in. The cloud services do the failover and a

I think hiring dedicated servers or VPS is a nice middle ground between self hosting and all out "cloud" cough lock-in. The cloud services do the failover and auto scaling for you, but often when something goes down it turns out they didn't even have any backups and all your data will be lost unless you actually backed it up yourself.