Or you could use a PaaS provider like Google App Engine and not have to deal with building, hosting and monitoring your own servers and stack of technologies.

Not to mention effortless scale-up when you need it, predictable pricing and built-in redundancy.

For anything but simple apps like this PaaS fall apart, first the pricing scheme is no inline with even a basic VPS. As you need to add features, if they don't support them your fairly screwed. App Engine took a year to add cron jobs. They still have a proprietary engine that I have to custom code for, and if you ever want to switch vendors you basically have to rewrite everything. TLDR : If you can rewrite all the code for your service in a few weekends then its fine to be on a PaaS

A very interesting thread. I haven't worked in this particular area, but isn't IaaS the happy medium? If you chose a platform, for example Node, you could shop around for the best value between Heroku, Joyent, CloudFoundry etc. In theory, the only lock-in would be your initial choice of platform, and you would keep the flexibility to scale up instances to meet demand.

Are things quite different in reality? I'd be interested to know.

PaaS providers offer anything but predictable pricing.

As for effortless scale-up and built-in redundancy, I kind of disagree ... IMHO you cannot scale without complete control. Ask Reddit about it.

I'm guessing you've never spend half an afternoon on a holiday finding an Internet cafe, convincing them to let you run PuTTY and SSHing into your "complete control" server to fix a trivial problem that brought down your app?

Comparing a bus arrival service for a 1/4 million population city with Reddit is .. irrelevant, at best.

I did spend afternoons getting servers back online - it certainly beats praying to God for the restoration of your service in a timely manner.

I'll take "Google screwed up, it'll be up when it's up" over "I screwed up, I'm dropping everything and scrambling to fix it" any day of the week.

Also just to scope the discussion: I'm not talking about big, important things - those with ops budgets and rotas - I'm talking about small/low-budget/side-project type thing, like the OPs project.

It would mean spending time configuring a server, which I have no interest in doing. I know nothing about Linux, and haven't dealt with any server configuration in over a decade.

The minimum number of things I have to deal with the happier I am - I want to get some functionality out there, and being able to just code it, upload it, and then let Google worry about databases, backups, upgrades, etc. makes life staggeringly simpler for me.