There's always the ability to tweak specifics for your setup that aren't available in many platforms.

IMHO, you shouldn't use a PaaS unless you know how to set your stack up. Essentially, if you don't recognize or have respect for the convenience you're being given (by going through a platform) then you'll potentially make bad decisions down the road. Personally, I prefer to learn how to set it up and scale it myself initially which helps me better understand what to look for in a platform.

Plus, there's something fun about putting all the pieces together and watching your apps come up (especially if you don't normally handle this part of the stack).

What do you think of Cloud Foundry that is a PaaS which is open source and you can control all the aspects of if you don't like them?

* Because i can.

* Because i can understand the technology behind the "magic".

* Because i can understand the technology behind the "magic" and design my system better.

* Because i can understand the technology behind the "magic" and design my system better and if PaaS provider goes out of business i have a chance to survive.

* Like snap said before : i've got the power...

And most important : because i'm a masochist bastard, who has trust problems...

But why not templetize the power into an open source system like Cloud Foundry, do it once and then forget about it? Why not design it once, use forever? You still get the power, you just have the time to think about other things, like actually getting shit done.

If you use Cloudfoundry.COM you are locked in, it's still in beta and we don't know about pricing model. If you use opensource version (Cloudfoundry.ORG) you still need "server guys".

I'd imagine on the whole due to cost. Heroku, for example, is a great stack, but costs a significant amount if you aren't flush with cash. This can be run on a small ec2 instance for a fraction of the cost, whilst it does have greater administrative overhead.

Why are people still think PaaS is the only way to host apps?

It isn't that people still think it is the only way. It is that people have realized that they don't want to be woken up in the middle of the night every time their server goes kaput. I have better things to do with my time.

I'd rather pay the 'extra' money to a PaaS in order to not have to a) hire a sysadmin, or pretend to be one on TV. b) get a full nights sleep. c) be able to go on vacation without worrying if the server is up or not. d) not have to worry about adding servers when my traffic has spiked and this one server isn't enough.

If you don't think EC2 instances go down, you are kidding yourself. Not only do they go down, but they 'appear' up. Talk about a mixed message. So, you also need to pay for a third party monitoring service just to tell you that your server is down.

At the end of the day, when you've added up all of those 'costs' of running your own servers, PaaS starts to look at lot more attractive. I certainly trust a company like Google AppEngine to be able to hire a lot more sysadmins, setup better monitoring and have better response times for fixing servers than I ever could.

I'd also love to never have to learn or remember the arcane list of setup configuration that this person blogged about. Instead, I'd rather be adding features to my app and making money.

Because depending on the size of what you are running PaaS can be very expensive.

Heroku support to Django is promising but it still has things to improve like database access which is a performance bottleneck.

Also I don't think comfortable having all this uncontrolled "magic" happening.

EC2 is free for a year so I think it's worth giving it a shot.

With the cost and control advantages of cloud or owned servers, PaaS seems like a tough sell. Setting up and administering servers has become much easier and continues to improve.

And what shall the PaaS providers use for their web servers? PaaSaaS? :)

I know you are joking, but the idea is that different levels of service are given by different people, and they may be layered one on top of another. I believe the term used these days is IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service. Amazon EC2 would be IaaS. Heroku or DotCloud would be PaaS. A PaaS company can have their infrastructure provided by an IaaS company.

It's Turtles as a Service all the way down.

Many parts of Heroku are actually self-hosted: https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions/running-heroku-on-heroku