The thing is, there is an awful lot of YAGNI going on. Engineering a web app in a way that autoscaling is effective is a lot of work. It is very well possible

The thing is, there is an awful lot of YAGNI going on. Engineering a web app in a way that autoscaling is effective is a lot of work. It is very well possible that renting a beefy dedicated server will do just fine and cost a magnitude or two less in renting and engineering both... Also, people tend to say I lost my mind when I say complex and expensive high availability solutions are often not worth it: it's cheaper to be down. Because you will be down, no matter what you do, there are a multitude of services you will rely on -- and some downtime is completely expected and accepted in this industry. So adding a few minutes every few years when you need to manually fall over to a slave database versus using a complex HA database solution? A cost-benefit analysis is in order. If you do need the cloud, yay but so many people no longer even consider whether they do.