Please do not trivialize the aspects of running a server on AWS (or a highly-available cluster) just for your own single application. Installing is the easy part, the day to day maintenance, reacting to issues, the 3am alerts (you set up alerting, right?) is what's costly.
I guess I was responding to the parent with ideas and links to use 'in case of emergency'. It isn't trivial, but some of these tools in conjunction with AWS make it possible to do alone, which I think is pretty cool. Alerting? Cloudwatch + PagerDuty gets me somewhat there.
