I don't know about way better. We had the experience of being both in managed hosting and the cloud from 1 server each to hundreds, and the cloud was better the entire way, with comparable costs. Especially if you're going to include engineering cost and you're talking about not many servers, any few hundred dollar/mo premium on AWS pays for itself. AWS reliability has also improved considerably in the past few years while managed hosting has not.

Besides, this article is about scaling. If your needs are static, who cares what you use. It's about where you go from there, and I'd rather be on the cloud before I have to.

Management tools have different needs from 2 servers to 10 to 50.