The issue with managing your own servers is that you are tied 1:1 to specific hardware. Something fails? You have no server. Need an upgrade? It's a financial o

The issue with managing your own servers is that you are tied 1:1 to specific hardware. Something fails? You have no server. Need an upgrade? It's a financial outlay. You may lease the hardware and you may also lease the hardware maintenance. In an environment like AWS you wouldn't really care about the hardware. Your instance would have died and you'd restart it and hope for a better hardware. You do trade ease on the hardware front with battling with the unknowns of the cloud. You just need to pick your battles. Hardware battles normally require more work and understanding of the hardware and a lot more menial work (RMA of an AWS instance is far simpler than RMA of a server).