I think one of the reasons is that people confuse physical servers with manual administration. As I said, I do not do manual administration. Nothing ever gets c

I think one of the reasons is that people confuse physical servers with manual administration. As I said, I do not do manual administration. Nothing ever gets configured on any server by hand. All administration is through ansible. I only have one ansible setup, and it can work both for virtualized servers and physical ones. No difference. The only difference is that virtualized servers need to be set up with terraform first, and physical ones need to be ordered first and their IPs entered into a configuration file (inventory). Of course, I am also careful to avoid becoming dependent on many other cloud services. For example, I use VpnCloud (https://github.com/dswd/vpncloud https://github.com/dswd/vpncloud) for communication between the servers. As a side benefit, this also gives me the flexibility to switch to any infrastructure provider at any time. My main point was that while virtualized offerings do have their uses, there is a (huge) gap between a $10/month hobby VPS and a company with exploding-growth B2C business. Most new businesses actually fall into that gap: you do not expect hockey-stick exponential growth in a profitable B2B SaaS. That's where you should question the usual default choice of "use AWS". I care about my COGS and my margins, so I look at this choice very carefully.