I want my servers up 100% of the time on a fast link, I'm not going to risk it building my own kit. Even though I do enjoy it. I've been running a VM, now a cloud VM, for 6 years and increased it over time as the system became popular. Currently serving upwards of 13,000 unique users per day with over 40K transactions globally. And still, it costs only $300/year. PER YEAR. I'd never pay as much as what is being discussed here. On the other hand, it's all running in Java. Had I used PHP, Ruby or some other slow junk then I might need that $500/month cloud vm.