We colo’d our own servers as a two person team. We didn’t have multiple availability zones, but we’d have the ability to fail over to leased machines if we need

We colo’d our own servers as a two person team. We didn’t have multiple availability zones, but we’d have the ability to fail over to leased machines if we needed to via automated builds and frequent offsite backups, and that was good enough for our needs. But we never needed to over the few years we ran this setup. This was after running on leased dedicated machines (which is a good first step so you can figure out what you actually need without putting out the money for hardware). A private network is ridiculously easy to set up. In our case, we had two switches, one public, one private. Every machine had 4 NICs. Just bind some to public addresses, some to private, plug in to appropriate switch. Unless your traffic is extremely bursty, auto scaling is probably more trouble than it’s worth. We were serving millions of users with three dual-socket machines. And if you really need it, you can try to handle base load with dedicated servers, and bursts with AWS infra. But at <$10k/mo on AWS, you’re not getting anywhere near the horsepower I’m talking about.