somebody else manage the infrastructure I submit that this is an overly simplistic view of what "the infrastructure" is, a view common among those who write so

somebody else manage the infrastructure I submit that this is an overly simplistic view of what "the infrastructure" is, a view common among those who write software: the infrastructre is anything that isn't the code they write. There are very few scenarios where a non-trivial site can be kept up (that is, not "dysfunctional or down" as the OP mentions early on) with merely application code and generic, undifferentiated, off-the-rack infrastructure. To scale even modestly, one must customize. The customization can start with the web framework and can eventually lead to hardware components (though the "lowest" I know of is Google's custom mobos). There are also operational considerations, such as I think there are two separate questions for any enterprise. The first is, is further customization an optimization. The second is, is the optimization premature? To suggest that, for all startups, the answer to the first is always "no" and/or the answer to the second is always "yes" would be overly broad.