At the end of the day, you need to make money. The question becomes: can you afford to be in the datacenter business? Executing well in operating a facility wi

At the end of the day, you need to make money. The question becomes: can you afford to be in the datacenter business? Executing well in operating a facility with significant scale means that you need to have folks working for you who have a clue about operating a datacenter. That's not cheap. IMO, the real question is whether or not you should be running your core business on a genericized "public cloud" like Amazon or if you should be using a traditional server hosting outfit, a managed service provider like Verizon/AT&T or a colo. There's a value calculation that you have to compute to figure out what's right for you. I worked for a company that ran call centers and had a significant commerce site (whose growth exploded beyond expectations) back in the early 2000's. Our offices were a converted school and the datacenter was a classroom with a roof A/C unit. We knew it sucked and suffered through downtime and failures, but the company wasn't big enough to do things the "right" way. So we had to do things the "wrong" way, because the alternative was to go out of business. If that were today, we would almost certainly have had 80% of our systems at Amazon/Rackspace facilities.