I also just submitted this article, nice that HN coalesces submissions.<p>I prefer using PaaS myself with Heroku and AppEngine being my favorites but I also enjoyed kicking the tires on dotCloud, OpenShift, and others.<p>That said I just rented a high capacity Hetzner.de server a few weeks ago because a lot of what I do, besides customer projects where they pay the bills for infrastructure, is learning side projects and some of my experiments take a lot of resources.<p>I can't comfortably afford to do some of my side projects on PaaS because I don't directly make money from them.