[vidarh]

If human costs dominate, you're doing something very wrong, and in any case renting the services only obscure this, and you can externalise that just as easily with managed servers by outsourcing the management.

What is truly expensive is buying a bundled service with massive margins.

Sometimes you have the luxury of not caring, e.g. when building very high margin, low scale tools where human costs dominate due to dev or other parts of the business, but for anything that starts requiring hosting costs beyond even as low as a couple of k a month, you're leaving money on the table.