Serious question: You have hundreds of hosts, but you don't think the savings of colocating your own hardware won't pay for an engineer to take care of the machines?
It would probably be possible to do it cheaper, but there is tremendous cost advantage at scale in this business. Then there's the question of focus. Do I want to have to hire the ops folks? their managers? create new payscales and review standards? Am I going to be good at attracting or judging talent in this field that is only tangentially related to software that I do know? Will the best people in that field want to work for me?