Could not agree more. I have multiple VPS servers running for personal email, file storage, ci, and some side projects. Maintenance and management is really low - everything is backed up to S3 and if things go down, it will take an hour or so to restore it, but I can tolerate that kind of downtime as long as data is not lost. I think cloud platform is easier to sell once you need a robust HA.

As for performance, one of my projects can sustain 300rps which is more than enough. Sure it cannot scale automatically to thousands and millions but I don't think many projects have that requirements.