Is there a guide out there on how to choose when to pay for web hosting vs. hosting your own? Assuming that root access is a must I would like to compare things like cost, scalability and personal stress.

Here is what I could come up with.

Paying for web hosting:

Benefits:

• Much cheaper for a small scale. I assume anything under $50 a month would be cheaper than paying for the bandwidth of hosting.

• No stress in dealing with power outages, server restarts or internet going down.

• For the most part less busy work involved with setting up.

Negatives:

• Cost goes way up when higher specs are needed (for example monthly cost triples with ability to use 8gb of ram that you can buy for $90 ). This means you have to target a particular ram usage and monitor so your instance stays within the threshold.
• root access for the most part is a premium.
• You may get tied into a vendor specific deployment process.

Hosting on own :

Positives:

• 100% control of specs and software.
• When you get past paying for the bandwidth you get much more bang for your buck by building your own machine.

Negatives:

• Doesn't make financial sense if bandwidth costs are more than web hosting costs.
• Having to deal with power outages, server restarts or internet going down.

I think the best of both worlds would be if there was a place that dealt with bandwidth, power outages and server restarts but you provided your own server. Kind of like a 24 hour day care for a server. Does anything like that exist?