Host your own app or have it hosted remotely?

I started off hosting remotely, but my extremely cheep hosting plan limited my CPU time excessively. Since I was behind a NAT, I had to do some proxying tricks through my provider to serve from my home computer:

http://programming.reddit.com/info/1e1a7/comments/c1e4ka

That certainly worked well. Now that I have more money to burn and a big site nearing launch though, I will definitely be trying out some dedicated hosting.

Basically the answer is: depends how broke you are.

I was wondering what would the best move be for my web app? To have it hosted remotely? Would it depend on the nature of the app? What would put customer's minds to ease when I pitch to them? thanks!

Completely depends on what you're doing--what kind of app you're building. A very good middle step is a VPS, which looks like your own server (full root, shell access) but is actually a virtual server on another box. With the latest virtualization in Linux this is a really good way to get cheap computing power.

You can even get hosting companies to provide fully managed servers, which means you just give them the app and they make sure it's always running and healthy.

Let me rephrase my question....would you rather have your own web server for your app? Or would you rather have it hosted remotely? which is cheaper? which is better in the in long run?