Hacker News Reader

Unless you are building your webservice like it's 1998 (And webservices in 1998 sucked), you can't really disentangle from hosted solutions.

Sure you can, and lots of people do.

Agreed, I would wager that this is where a good majority of startups begin until they take a good stock of the situation at hand.

Heck, I do it in my current job. It's not that different from running in AWS.