I don’t think anyone is saying that VPS and dedicated server providers aren’t an option. Rather, most startups rule them out since, if you grow enough to where the administration control of the Cloud is warranted, that past decision now warrants a host migration and the month+ of planning that goes into that. Unless the company really started as a side-project whose main funding was extra cash from the founder, it doesn’t make sense to artificially limit your growth.

Once more, it’s not like AWS is absolutely nothing. Chances are that any web-based startup would indeed be able to take advantage of the many autoscale-as-a-service features of AWS, enabling them to handle the next quarterly 100x increase in customers and throughout.

Feels to me like you have zero experience scaling outside the big cloud provider as this is simply not true

I'm only talking about why you would choose a cloud provider over VPS/dedicated, not that they're the only possible choice if you want to scale, so I don't see what is "not true" about my comment.

>These types of comments constantly come up

because triple++ digit margins enable cloud service providers to allocate vast amounts of money towards marketing.

Give us your contacts to us to receive our gift cards then.