> If you're a startup who wants to minimize capex and quickly spin up a reliable, secure infra to host your app on to get it out of the door ASAP, you would go with cloud.

Why on earth would a startup waste money like that? Just rent a few servers, most places will have it up in a few minutes, guaranteed, any large provider have automated that long ago. Much, much cheaper than the cloud. It seems, even in this thread, that there are two choices: cloud or colo. Hell no to either. Rent dedicated -- yes.

The only reason one would go with the cloud is if you plan to use their services ie not EC2 but the many others. However, those can have a runaway cost too and it's not clear whether a new startup should take on handcuffs like that -- once you decided you are depending on SQS etc it'll be hard to move to elsewhere.