I love this article! For my hobby/entrepreneurial websites https://clubcompy.com and http://cardmeeting.com, I self-host at a local colocation facility. It has been fun learning experience for me to build enterprise apps without big iron. I don't like having the upfront cost of the server and network hardware, but I do know I'm spending less per year than I would if I went to the cloud. My colo was nice enough to give me 4U at a flat monthly rate, and I don't have to worry about blowing through any bandwidth limits and having costs go haywire if I have a spike in visitors. Having that dependable monthly expense enables me to pay for it out of my mad money and not anger the CFO (my wife ;)