I could write a novel in response to this. Top comment reflects on how "getting to market fast" is the most important thing, much more important than costs. I

I could write a novel in response to this. Top comment reflects on how "getting to market fast" is the most important thing, much more important than costs. I agree. Second comment reflects on reliability. Reliability is only a concern when you actually have a product that people want to use. Cold hard truth: If you are trying to get to market as fast as possible, most of the cloud abstractions are going to slow you down in most situations. It can be worth it, but your MVP should be as fast to develop as possible and there's nothing faster than writing code and running it. Second, the reliability of a single machine is much more than you think. Until recently AWS didn't even cover their own reliability of a single instance, if they needed to boot you off a node and shut down your EC2 instance: you might get a bit of notice. Ironically, you don't even need five-nines in most cases, and if you do, cloud only gives you a toolbox to get there, it's not going to get you there without serious human investment. You will get 2-3 nines of availability with a bog standard PHP+MYSQL on a single machine. You know how I know? Because we all did this 15 years ago and truthfully: servers and operating systems are significantly more robust now than they were then, so it's only gotten better for those who do things "wrong".