Have you tried maintaining some infrastructure over a decade? I did. And I sincerely don't know, which way is better. There are tradeoffs. Physical hardware

Have you tried maintaining some infrastructure over a decade? I did. And I sincerely don't know, which way is better. There are tradeoffs. Physical hardware doesn't change underneath you, but can fail, require expensive maintenance itself and reliable infrastructure around it (colo). Hosting providers tend to phase out services or even go out of business completely. PaaS limits you, providers change the APIs all the time. Having been a EC2 user since its announcement and first open beta, I'm actually more and more inclined to think that it IS mature enough to be considered. I'm pretty sure that if I'd try, I can find an AMI from 2007 and it would run perfectly well. On the other hand from costs perspective, reserved instances are not that expensive, and, unlike regular hosting providers, costs pretty much guarantied to go down, in the long term.