[perpetualcrayon]

Up to a certain scale I think being completely off the cloud is never out of the question.

But if you're a small-ish team with ambitions of building something that may one day need to scale quickly to support a large influx of traffic / customers (generally unannounced / unplanned), I think it's insane not to have a cloud strategy / presence.

I have never seen research on it, but my hunch is that given that a large number of websites / services end up being impacted simultaneously, it's probably better to be down when everyone else is, than being the only one down.

In my experience when there's a large-scale outage, that information is far more likely to get back to the end user a lot faster, and in a fashion where it may not even impact their perception of your business (ie. maybe they originally experienced the issue on someone else's website / app).

But you can be certain that while you're down when everyone else is up, your potential and existing customers / users are far more likely to blame you and begin searching for alternatives.