I've seen how seriously some providers/hosting companies treat backups. Let's just say that deleting backups to free up space for new accounts was considered pe

I've seen how seriously some providers/hosting companies treat backups. Let's just say that deleting backups to free up space for new accounts was considered perfectly OK. I completely agree it is something you -want- to outsource, because, exactly as you say, it's not something you want to spend time on. But you depend on your servers so completely that you become completely dependent on your provider. What if your provider goes bankrupt? You'll have to move your server / move the data and nobody knows how it used to work. At that point you have very few options left. What if a tech decides to upgrade the kernel and the server doesn't boot anymore? Oops. In general, the linux techs aren't paid very well, are often overworked, are expected to fix problems at any point in the night and they don't particularly care about your server (no more than they care about the 100 servers next to it). Now add root access to the mix and watch what happens. If nobody in your startup team knows how to administer a server then you're taking a risk. A big and unnecessary one. ps: saying something like "an optimized Postgres install" makes no sense. Optimization is for specific tasks. So unless the techs know exactly what kind of queries you run they can't do much optimization. They can however, easily cripple sql performance.