There's something between "cloud" and "build your own servers and rack them yourselves" -- I think managed colo/dedicated hosting is probably the sweet spot for most companies which don't need the burstiness of cloud servers and aren't in the dedicated datacenter business themselves (or with unique hardware, performance, security, etc. needs).

e.g. SoftLayer dedicated servers, or a quality local/smaller/industry-specific provider. IIRC hackernews runs on a SoftLayer dedicated server.