[beanstalknoob]

If you hadn't been a sysadmin, would still have chosen dedicated hosting? (Given that you have serious scaling requirements, of course). In other words: Would it be realistic to say that a service like Elastic Beanstalk saves on hiring a sysadmin?

[devonkim]

Sysadmins / operations people should be able to handle anything below an OS better than your usual devops guys that would be able to build you a variation of EBS and their value further depends upon if your software has special needs that are not suitable for cloud / virtualized infrastructure.

I've heard of many start-up companies save plenty of money using dedicated hosting even without any operations / sysadmin pros around scaling to millions of users when the equivalent in AWS with relatively anemic nodes fared much better. In fact, WhatsApp only had a handful of physical servers handling billions of real users and associated internal messaging and they had developers as the on-call operations engineers.

I'm an ops engineer / developer and I'd use dedicated hosting if success depends a lot upon infrastructure costs. For example, if I started a competitor to Heroku at the same time they did, I'd definitely be having a very careful debate between dedicated / colo hosting and using a cloud provider tied intimately with my growth plans. Many companies have shockingly bad operations practices but achieve decent availability (and more importantly for most situations, profitability) just fine, so even the often-cited expectations of better networks and availability zones may be worth the risks of not caring that much.