TL;DR As a solo entrepreneur I cannot manage a server myself. PaaS comes in as a life saver. Since I started hosting my apps on Google App Engine I saved time and money, but the best part is: my app is secure and scalable without having to lift a finger.
Here is the longer story that made me quit dedicated servers for PaaS:
Three years ago I was on vacation with my wife in Turkey. At the time I was running a lead management tool. One morning while my wife was dressing up I opened my laptop for a routine check on my dedicated server, And boom, server hacked and all files encrypted!
I had two customers onboard, both running massive lead generation campaigns. Not only my day was ruined because I had to spend the whole day reinstalling the server, but the 24h downtime made me look like a fool to my customers. End of the day, my whole vacation was ruined.
This episode made me take a radical decision: I will never host my applications on a server instance again (think EC2). I simply cant outsmart hackers. So I started looking for alternatives. That's when I re-discovered PaaS.
I remember a few years ago having played around with Google App Engine, but never took it seriously. Now that I had a real professional app to host, the promise of PaaS seemed suddenly very tempting. I gave it a try, read the docs, and in 1 day I was able to get a first version of my app to run on GAE. Not all features where working yet, but I was ecstatic already.
Fast forward, today I cant imagine working without GAE. It's like all of Google is working for me to host secure and scale my apps. Azure and AWS have similar offers, that I didn't really check, but I am sure they provide the same value as GAE.
Security and scalability or only some of the features that PaaS offers out of the box. So if you are like me, a solo engineer or even a small team still hosting your app on server instances, I bet its only a matter of time until you switch to PaaS. You'd better start right now.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation to Google or any other platform. Just sharing my experience as a happy user.