I hate these articles. You write an article which claims to tell me why my the cloud isn't right for MY startup, and then conclude " If no one in your team has the experience, or time, to learn devops, then a PaaS solution like Heroku would be a more logical choice."

So really, you're not saying the cloud isn't right for anybody's startup at all. You're stating the obvious, which is "if you have someone with sysadmin skills, use those skills". Well, duh.

As a technical co-founder, I can either spend my time learning all there is to know about being a sysadmin, or I can outsource it for DIRT CHEAP. Even at $1500 a month for something like Heroku, it's still cheaper than spending as little as 10-15 hours of my own time managing a server.

Besides, for the first 6mths of your startup, the actual costs for Heroku are likely to be less than $100 a month for a couple of dynos. It's not even worth the time to read the manual at those rates. A couple of git commands, and you're done...even for a complete novice. By the time you're needing those 24 dynos, you likely have the revenue to support the cost.

You can always make more money, but you can't make more time. As a technical founder of a business, your job isn't to be doing something that you can pay someone else to do. You should be making magic happen in your product.