I too think there is no one winner here. There are some cases where going with an IAAS makes a ton of sense. From the top of my mind, 1. Scale up/down - you c

I too think there is no one winner here. There are some cases where going with an IAAS makes a ton of sense. From the top of my mind, 1. Scale up/down - you can say turn off servers off season/nights and spin up only when needed. 2. Your business is not big enough to hire a person for Ops. 3. You don’t have the space for a server room/ unwilling to take the burden of dealing with a co-location provider and are willing to pay through the nose for that choice. 4. Your devs are okay with doing Ops (managing server resources on AWS is still Ops. You still need sense of firewalls, DNS, backups, updates, change management etc) 5. Ownership vs Operation : if a business is not sure they will sustain that amount of resource needs long enough to buy hardware. Buying reserved instances on Amazon comes to mind as opportunities that could have been better as a co located servers. 6. Geography - At times you need geographical spread (CDN, or multiple office/customer locations) IMO, unless you can find yourself one such justification for the extra costs, you should consider self hosted or atleast collocated servers. At least this is what I tell my friends in the business who seek advice on infrastructure.