[Fannon]

A lot of good arguments which I think are often under looked. "We need to go into the cloud" often feels more like a peer pressure thing. It might be difficult to get a Hetzner server through the ordering processes of your company, compared to self-service rent something from AWS or the like (feels like this may be equal reason why they're so successful?).

But the article completely mises out on the aspect of availability, which would be quite risky with a single server.

Why not do mix & match smartly? A CDN is already "the cloud". Having your static content hosted (and pre-generated fully) in the cloud and only go on dynamic generated / rendered responses if you really have to. Then you have good latency, high availability and still low costs.

[bcaxis]

I think it's more an architecture question. If one box works, stop building on services that force horizontal thinking, and pricing, from the get go.

You can solve one box availability with box 2 (hot backup) - all within the same architecture and price structure.