Ask HN: Cloud Infrastructure Hosting - to be or not to be?

Say you have a small startup idea in mind - you can't get any help (read, hire) so everything will be made by you. The prototype, the selling, the marketing, administration. No way you can do it all efficiently, so something has to go. Marketing and the legwork can't be outsourced as easily as basic admining, so is it worth it? Do you get "bad" habbits from using services such as Pagoda/Heroku?

I always used to host and configure all my machines (VPS, basic AWS or dedicated). It's fine on a small scale, but maintaining 5-10 small boxes is a time killer, especially when you have a tall technology stack.

Not planning to get alot of traffic at first, but the structure has to be there from the beginning - then I will scale.

So basically, are these infrastructure providers:

- Cost effective compared to VPS/Cloud hosting (Linode, AWS)

- Really do scale as advertised? Being removed from low level optimizations one can do to LAMP setup can be VERY limiting...Does the scaling part is as easy and offsetting? Not knowing the precise my.cnf or httpd.conf settings is enough to give me nightmares.

- Are crack heroin? Will usage of such provider give one terrible coding and architecture decisions? Will the move away to dedicated require large changes to the actual codebase?

Thank you!