Yes. Cloud hosting puts out of the operator's space of concern actual maintenance of the hardware, which for most companies that want something like 24/7 uptime is a big deal.
I worked at a small company where we planned for 24/7 uptime before clouds were ubiquitous. We planned out which of the three engineers in the team would hold the pager and the cost of gas reimbursements for them to drive one state over to deal with the machine in the secured rack facility if it physically went down. We didn't have nearly enough bandwidth capacity to our building itself to support the traffic we anticipated for our service.
Smaller projects that don't require 24/7 uptime can be self-hosted, but you still want to be aware of fabric-layer security... If you're hosting on a machine in your building and somebody roots it, what will physical access to your intranet let them get away with? Can they see source code from there? Financials? Employee database? All of this is less a concern if you're using AWS with separated instances that are no more connected to each other than Netflix is to Disney+, even if they're in the same building.
Cloud hosting lets you focus on the software and credentials and pay someone else to focus on hardware and application of credentials.
I worked at a small company where we planned for 24/7 uptime before clouds were ubiquitous. We planned out which of the three engineers in the team would hold the pager and the cost of gas reimbursements for them to drive one state over to deal with the machine in the secured rack facility if it physically went down. We didn't have nearly enough bandwidth capacity to our building itself to support the traffic we anticipated for our service.
Smaller projects that don't require 24/7 uptime can be self-hosted, but you still want to be aware of fabric-layer security... If you're hosting on a machine in your building and somebody roots it, what will physical access to your intranet let them get away with? Can they see source code from there? Financials? Employee database? All of this is less a concern if you're using AWS with separated instances that are no more connected to each other than Netflix is to Disney+, even if they're in the same building.
Cloud hosting lets you focus on the software and credentials and pay someone else to focus on hardware and application of credentials.