I spent this last weekend building a little passion project and getting it up and running on a virtual server. I showed it to some people and they seemed to enjoy it, but everyone had a similar question: "Why did you build this yourself when you could have just done X?"

I'm a self-taught hobbyist so I admit my expertise is minimal, but it seems like so many people are turning to push-button "send this company your code and they'll run it for you" hosting solutions instead of just running things themselves. I don't want to badmouth this new practice (we're programmers, new practices are always worth investigating), but I'm just wondering if the classic "my code running on my server" methodology is now considered obsolete?

Thanks for your input. I'm really curious about this.