If they've got an in-house sysadmin, you can get a lot of PaaS time for that price. If they've got an agency tasked with looking after their servers, in my experience that's not a great situation; you might get a little more personal attention than you would from a PaaS vendor, but you're always a client rather than a colleague, and you're pretty much paying for the same product that a PaaS would sell you; they might be cheaper, but the worst-case downtime is much longer. If you're outsourcing the whole package of software development and deployment then it's not really your problem any more. But in my experience a surprisingly large number of companies - especially those "family business" sized ones - fit into that window where a handful of in-house developers make sense, but an in-house sysadmin doesn't; sometimes they'll get lucky and one of those developers is happy being a part-time sysadmin, but if not then a PaaS can be a good tradeoff, even if on a per-unit basis it looks expensive.