I'm just very surprised that more startups don't have people who both enjoy the experience and are good at it.

Also, people make it sound like EC2 is management-free. It isn't. It might take less time, which is important, and the problems might be different, but it isn't a fire-and-forget solution.

I enjoy it, I just don't see how you could do that and get even close to the price of a VPS. In other words: colocation is expensive for a startup.