The nice thing about AWS is it takes away many of the hassles of scaling up quickly and headaches of hardware failure, but it is actually cheaper to own and run

The nice thing about AWS is it takes away many of the hassles of scaling up quickly and headaches of hardware failure, but it is actually cheaper to own and run your own server for a early stage startup as hardware costs are generally covered in the first year (there are many comparisons, Google it). Plus if you have a good relationship with an ISP (free/low-cost hosting and bandwidth), I would go with that.