Managing your own servers instead of managed services is hard! It requires admin skills in addition to dev skills on your team, gets seriously hard with increas

Managing your own servers instead of managed services is hard! It requires admin skills in addition to dev skills on your team, gets seriously hard with increasing levels of security, makes planning and spikes much harder, ... but can also be highly rewarding in terms of costs, mastering your environment, optimization and dev quality, ... The choice is mostly about how much time and will you have or plan to have on your team for it. You'll have to handle files and database replications, you'll have to update the systems (with reboots), you'll have to fix very tricky issues, ... that would have been handled otherwise. OVH (and some others like Online.net) have great products with amazing pricings. I have seen a few startups relying on many of their (rather small) servers and it was all great. One thing to remember is that human time costs much higher than cloud time.