I think the important thing to take away from articles like this is that the cloud isn't the only way (not that you should then title the article "Why the cloud isn't for your startup"). If you do know a bit of sysadmin stuff and/or you're running a bootstrapped company it's good to know you can pay about 10% of what you'd pay on AWS by using dedicated gear (particularly if you have predictable traffic, as a lot of sites do). "X hours of my time is the same cost as Heroku" only works if you have cash in the bank or each hour of your time directly brings in cash.

We do have a slightly special case with >100TB of storage and monthly bandwidth, though. When we started I assumed S3 (or another cloud service) was the only way and never dreamed of building my own distributed file system.