I agree with you. I think this is a good time to (again) point to Pinboard's "The Five Stages of Hosting": http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/01/the_five_stages_of_ho

I agree with you. I think this is a good time to (again) point to Pinboard's "The Five Stages of Hosting": http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/01/the_five_stages_of_hosting/ http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/01/the_five_stages_of_hosting/ You should move up the hosting chain as your needs demand it, and not before. Yes, you'll pay more for cloud-hosted solutions, but if one of the racked servers has a power supply failure or a motherboard failure or bad RAM or a failed drive, that's their problem to deal with, not yours -- and at the moment, most of the cloud providers seem to be very good at dealing with it. All of those things are a distraction, and worse still, if you don't have multiple layers of redundancy -- which will add to your costs -- then they can result in down time for your service, which is bad. I, personally, would not move to a dedicated server until the costs for required resources became so egregious in the cloud that I could no longer afford not to use a dedicated server.