What you describe only becomes a bigger problem with staff turnover. It gets to a point where fewer people know the ins and outs of the setup and are prepared t

What you describe only becomes a bigger problem with staff turnover. It gets to a point where fewer people know the ins and outs of the setup and are prepared to maintain it. You end up burning out a few people, or bringing in people just to deal with low-level operations issues that were created by the move away from the VPS-level of operations. The question to ask, is it strategic to move to running our own servers? If I had a large, stable, and boring set of apps which consistently didn't take advantage of "cloud features", then it might make sense to consider moving to colocation because the only option to improve profitability may be to reduce cost. That assumes that major changes won't be made to the app that require cloud features. This is rarely the case. The opportunities seem to only appear at huge scale.