I run my own mini-cloud at home (42u rack with way too much hardware). I do my best to follow best practices with regard to hardware, backups, redundancy, etc. I keep downtime to a minimum (Plex is life, yo). I've been doing it for around 20 years, so I'm fairly confident I know what I'm doing.

As a Director of Technology for a real company, I have never, nor would I ever dream of even considering moving to bare metal for ANYTHING mission critical. The sheer number of possible catastrophies that can occur at the infrastructure level would have me shitting my pants 24/7. Could we hire someone (or a team) to do it? Yes. But EC2 and similar infrastructure beats the pants off those salaries any day.