That's not quite where I would draw the line, I don't think. I used to work for an ISP and we were kind of split between AWS and on-prem. Obviously, things li

That's not quite where I would draw the line, I don't think. I used to work for an ISP and we were kind of split between AWS and on-prem. Obviously, things like terminating our customers' fiber feeds had to be on-prem, so there was no way to not have a data center (fortunately in the same building as our office). Moving our website to some server in there wouldn't have been much of a stretch to me, at the end of the day, it's just a backend for cloudflare anyway. Like most startups, our management of the data center was pretty scrappy. Our CEO liked that kind of stuff, and we had a couple of network engineers that could be on call to fix overnight issues. It definitely wasn't a burden at the 50 employees size of company (and that includes field techs that actually installed fiber, dragged cable under the street, etc.) We actually had some Linux servers in the datacenter. I don't know why, to be completely honest. So overall my thought is that maybe use the cloud for your 1 person startup, but sometimes you need a datacenter only and it's not really rocket science. You're going to have downtime while someone drives to the datacenter. You're going to have downtime when us-east-1 explodes, too. To me, it's a wash.