Yeah I think you missed my point. When starting out, at the point where I am not worried about scale, which means I would be looking at Orchestra's "basic" package (that doesn't scale), I am having a hard time understanding why I should pay 3x more than I would rolling my own server at Rackspace Cloud.

When my app needs to start scaling up a lot (and that's often an "if" not a "when" for a lot of projects), then for sure I agree that a well-managed service backed by talented people is worth every penny.