You think bad things don't happen on AWS? You think that an experienced admin isn't going to spend significantly more time trying to communicate with an actual human at Amazon than fixing a problem on a physically controlled server?
This is incredibly naive.
I've never had AWS tell us that they can't find the server we're renting that suffered HDD failure. AWS has never cut us off from the Internet because a sysop typed a command in the wrong session.
And we find AWS support to be far quicker to respond, and far more effective, than our previous providers.
So, YMMV, but AWS is pretty damn good for our requirements.
Scalability is the thing and AWS its Viagra. Whoever has the biggest scalability get to pat itself in the back.
It's a sliding scale. What makes you money? What's your expected growth? What are your security needs? What experience does your team have?
In this thread, people at each end of the scale are 1. conflating different use cases (wordpress is not the same as a massive, scaled data ingest pipeline) and 2. are ignoring the hidden costs of both.