The (vast) majority of small businesses are not out to grow as fast as possible, seeking that big money valley exit. Most are family operations that seek to stay at whatever size that might encompass. FWIW.
"The (vast) majority of small businesses are not out to grow as fast as possible, seeking that big money valley exit. "
This is nothing to do with what I said though.
A 'mom and pop shop' that isn't doing product, and only needs IT, may still likely be very well served by the cloud because they probably only need a few EC2s and some minor services and frankly that's very cheap relatively speaking.
'Expertise' is quite expensive, and doesn't come into value unless there is some scale in place - I don't mean 'millions of users' but a company that has <50 staffers ... for IT there's no reason they can't be fully cloud.
'Mom and Pop Shops' want to know what a 'rack' is about as much as they want to know what a 'filter' is for their engine. The idea is to get rid of all of that overhead.
>for IT there's no reason they can't be fully cloud.
Without even taking other aspects in to account, I think you overestimate the availability, reliability, and speed of internet connections for much of the country.
Even for that kind of small-scale business: what happens when that server has hardware trouble? Are they testing their backups regularly? Something like Heroku might cost them much more in an average month, but it eliminates a huge range of worst case scenarios.
They have a contract with an IT professional to handle that sort of thing for them, same as they would have a contract with someone who uses Heroku or Amazon to fill their IT needs if they were using those servers instead.
If they've got an in-house sysadmin, you can get a lot of PaaS time for that price. If they've got an agency tasked with looking after their servers, in my experience that's not a great situation; you might get a little more personal attention than you would from a PaaS vendor, but you're always a client rather than a colleague, and you're pretty much paying for the same product that a PaaS would sell you; they might be cheaper, but the worst-case downtime is much longer. If you're outsourcing the whole package of software development and deployment then it's not really your problem any more. But in my experience a surprisingly large number of companies - especially those "family business" sized ones - fit into that window where a handful of in-house developers make sense, but an in-house sysadmin doesn't; sometimes they'll get lucky and one of those developers is happy being a part-time sysadmin, but if not then a PaaS can be a good tradeoff, even if on a per-unit basis it looks expensive.
Helping companies deal with that gap is what I do in a nutshell. It's rather enjoyable- I work directly with the owners to help develop a good IT/Data management plan, then offer monthly service/retainer contracts for the rest of it. No overhead of an agency to account for, so it's cheaper for them, good income for me.
