The author makes too many generalizations in this article.... My company uses Rackspace, which has been fantastic, and as far as I could find Rackspace has no demerits listed in the article. Common complaints like poor support or limited customizability have just not been issues so far. Maybe when we become huge and can afford racks of servers and such matters as hardware customization become relevant issues to us it will be time to make the switch to our own servers, but as far as I can tell, as long as the hosting company doesn't suck at certain critical service aspects like support, cloud hosting only helps small startups get off the ground more easily.