I was also gonna come in here and mention the middle ground. Amazon is great either if you don't want to commit to anything, or if you have very spiky load and

I was also gonna come in here and mention the middle ground. Amazon is great either if you don't want to commit to anything, or if you have very spiky load and sometimes need to spin up a lot of servers. Building your own servers is dirt cheap, but there's always the risk of hardware breaking, and you can't exactly scale up very quickly. But the middle ground, rented dedicated servers, can be a perfect compromise for a lot of companies. Scaling up and adding servers might take a day instead of instantly, and it costs more than owning servers, but you get all the benefits of managed hosting, broken hardware simply isn't something you need to worry about anymore. If a server goes wonky, just scrap it and rent a new one.