Very much this. For most use cases, the out-of-the-box configuration is fine until you hit ridiculous scale, and it's not really all that complicated to keep a service running if you take time to read the docs.
It just came to mind Jason Fried's Getting Real chapter titled "Scale Later". Page 44.
"For example, we ran Basecamp on a single server for the first year. Because we went with such a simple setup, it only took a week to implement. We didn’t start with a cluster of 15 boxes or spend months worrying about scaling.
Did we experience any problems? A few. But we also realized
that most of the problems we feared, like a brief slowdown,
really weren’t that big of a deal to customers. As long as you keep people in the loop, and are honest about the situation, they’ll understand."
