Re: Someone Else's Computer certification
The answer is... it depends.
Is your project going to be truly "steady traffic" 24x7, or does it have steady traffic only during the day? If you design for the cloud you could use much smaller servers and scale out as needed. Migrate to a bigger server instance size? Piece of piss.
Also, what happens if your power goes out for several hours? Are you going to keep a UPS?
Have you factored in the cost of electricity for this server?
When you say "simply renting a server" do you mean at a colo, or in your own premises?
Even with a colo, you are risking a long outage if they have a flood / fire / something you haven't thought of. So, you're gonna need two which are geographically apart.
If your project is down for a week, are all your customers going to disappear and go somewhere else? Or will they not care?
I, personally would not dream of hosting something myself unless it was very small, and I don't care about down time or very big, and not at all bursty. I actually can't think of a small project that I would host myself, but I guess there might be some.
Cloud just takes away so many headaches. They have top class security (Not Azure though). Three AZs if you want it. Backups are super easy. Power supply is reliable. Database administration is super easy. As much bandwidth as you can handle. You can go "serverless" with FaaS, at least for some jobs / workloads, which means you can scale to zero.
OTOH, it can be a confusing nightmare and they seem to release dozens of new services every month. IAM can be particularly mind blowing. If you want to even just list the tags on an EC2 snapshot with Python, you'll end up digging into some horrid JSON queries. Oh, and cost CAN get way out of control if you don't keep on top of thing. It's just too easy to spin up a new xyz and forget to shut it down. But there are LOTS of things you can do to keep cost down.