[bfell]

I think this article does an OK job of outlining parts of the decision tree for cloud vs. self-hosted (while ignoring other options like traditional hosting providers). The other things to consider are staffing and materials costs if maintaining servers in house, DR/business continuity, time value of money depending on how the servers are financed, replacement of aging hardware and operating environments, and differences of how the infrastructure would be built (clustered, load balanced, geographic load balanced, etc.). The reality is cloud providers provide a lot of building blocks for you to use to design infrastructure in a more robust manner but that doesn't mean that other options should be ignored - it’s another decision that depends on the factors laid out in the article and a lot of others that are specific to each organization.