For the sake of discussion, I'll play devil's pedantic advocate... "better services" and "many advantages" might be subjective. 🙂

You could buy hardware, pay licensing costs, additional backup time/storage, and a DBA salary to have in-house services. You might even be able to find a DBA that is 100% dedicated to keeping everything running ideally-optimal. I have no idea how to estimate the true TCO for this setup.

You could make almost all of this someone else's problem for a fraction of that cost. Again, I am not familiar with true costs of cloud services under real-world usage patterns - but let's call it somewhere between 10% and 50%. I understand the initial purchase is depreciated but the DBA salary is probably fixed or rising over years as is the amount of data to backup, etc.

What is the percentage of downtime from a cloud provider? 1%? 5%? Now it's a matter of expected utility (ok, so that's a game theory term for "bet" or "gamble") Is it worth 10x the cost to reduce the 1% event to 0% (or 2x the cost to reduce 5% to 0%) This also perhaps unrealistically assumes the in-house error percentage is 0% - the question might be: is it worth 10x the cost to reduce the 1% failure of big/impersonal cloud to the 0.5% failure rate of an extra careful person-I-know.

If the cost of the 1% event exceeds the difference in maintenance cost for the in-house solution, the choice is clear. I imagine the real cost of that 1% downtime is frayed nerves for our stakeholders, but that lost revenue for small-mid size business is less than the cost to guard against.

I know a DBA isn't supposed to roll dice; however, in many cases there needs to be a balance between acceptable risk and cost to mitigate those risks.