Not sure how how you could jump all the way to running your own Asian datacenter from my post. A bit amusing though :). I even wrote that it's worth running the LB/DB in the Cloud?
Oh it was more of an addition to your point about "reducing complexity of managing the most frustrating things like the load-balancer and the database, albeit at a price of course". There is a whole mountain of complexity that most software engineers never think about when they dream about going back to the good old on prem days.
Alright, just feels like taking a bit too far into the exceptions. Even back then only large companies would consider that. Renting servers, renting a server rack (co-location), or even just a in-office server rack for what would be a startup today.
