> > Also buy your own hardware
> Great idea, I’d love to! Just one small problem: who will pay for the upfront cost of that?
Not to mention that kind of kills scalability. Plus, cost of colocation can be higher than what I estimate the cost of operation would be post-move to cloud. Then in 5 years when we run out of storage on that shiny server we bought, we have to drop _lotsofmoney_ to either upgrade or replace the obsolete server, also requiring untrivial amounts of manual labor to move everything.
Also, I suspect your site doesn't get to the point where if you don't cache you run out of server bandwidth instantly.