[ajb]

The first startup I joined, which was 12 people 20 years ago, had our own servers and an IT guy who took the alternate backup tapes home personally. When you have that, running as many services as possible locally, instead of paying for them, makes sense as you are increasing the value you get out of your operational capacity.

I now work in a start-up of 40 people, we don't have any servers or dedicated IT or DevOps staff. All admin gets done in the spare time of a couple of engineers, who have no desire to further lose their development time to admin/ops. It makes more sense to pay a subscription and let someone else deal with it. Even for the backend guys running that kind of service is more operationally complex than most of what they do - no-one has the experience of operating 'pets' class servers.