Your local site can't implement DDoS protection though, you have to buy that from cloudflare or some other reverse proxy anyway, so cloud is always in your futu

Your local site can't implement DDoS protection though, you have to buy that from cloudflare or some other reverse proxy anyway, so cloud is always in your future in some form. Also your local site can't move to Australia or Taiwan or wherever when you realize your user base is more global than you thought. I mean, your intuition is correct that "cloud" is mostly just a bunch of boring, standard computers running boring standard software and there isn't anything they do that you can't. But at the same time, boring standard software is (by definition!) commoditized and if you're spinning up some new and interesting thing, it's only going to be differentiated by the parts that are not boring and standard. So put the boring standard stuff on a credit card and do the interesting stuff instead.