AWS plus a dedicated sysadmin company delivering the same service level as a good hosting provider always seemed like the sweet spot to me. Barring scenarios wh

AWS plus a dedicated sysadmin company delivering the same service level as a good hosting provider always seemed like the sweet spot to me. Barring scenarios where you actually need your own iron to deal with performance bottlenecks, it's the best of both worlds. The cost of hardware or cloud services is pretty much irrelevant compared to the cost of sysadmin hours, be it your own or hiring someone else. Unfortunately most people only learn that lesson when the shit hits the fan. Downtime is costly. Getting hacked even more so.