i know how to do administration, but i prefer to pay someone else to handle that stuff. its more economical, to me.

or maybe i'm just bad at it and do it slower than everyone else. i can't tell.

i also don't have any app that runs more than 100 concurrent users, and i develop on my own local servers. i deploy on hosted servers. for reference.

I manage my own servers. it took a while to get it to a point where you could realy call it production servers. and I wouldn't have done it if I could have found hosting services that offered what I needed for a good price. but now that I have it's not bad.

The best alternative would be managed private servers.

I work at a research university/hospital and manage my own servers for my department. Each server runs Debian or Ubuntu, Apache, MySQL.

I can't imagine not being able to admin my own servers. That's part of what being a hacker is all about.