Idk what your team’s expertise is, but I’d advise avoiding the cloud as long as possible. If you can build out an on-premise infrastructure, it will be a huge competitive advantage for your company because it will allow you to offer features that your competitors can’t.
Examples of this:
- Cloudflare built up their own network and infrastructure and it’s always been their biggest asset. They set the standard for free tier of CDN pricing, and nobody who builds a CDN on top of an existing cloud provider will ever beat it.
- Zoom. By hosting their own servers and network, Zoom is similarly able to offer a free tier where they are not subject to variable costs from free customers losing them money on bandwidth charges.
- WhatsApp. They scaled to hundreds of millions of users with less than a dozen engineers, a few dozen (?) servers, and some Erlang code.
IMO defaulting to the cloud is one of the worst mistakes a young company can make. If your app is not business critical, you can probably afford up to a day of downtime or even some data loss. And that is unlikely to happen anyway, as long as you’ve got a capable team looking after it who chooses standard and robust software.
