[rbanffy]

You need to find the right balance between an expert IT team and cheaper employees. Using pre-baked cloud services is always easier, requires less management, but the operational expenditure is higher while the staffing cost might be lower. Where the company is based will also impact the professionals you'll have access to - there are places where you can have highly skilled people, and places where you'll struggle to even fully staff your IT operation.

> Do you propose that we should have hosted all of that on some VMs?

What do you think Amazon uses to run the services you pay for? Unicorns?