One minor, tiny correction: What made Rackspace successful was that they created a co-lo service without those headaches. I remember using Rackspace for co-lo and it was a breezy setup. I do seem to remember it being a pain to scale up, though. Seems like I also remember the costs being a couple hundred per month, too, not cheap, as you said. But they took a lot of worry out of the release cycle.

Parler is a cautionary tale for even people in white hats. They had terrible security protocols, and their buffoon users were hammered accordingly. Parler's poor knowledge of release engineering practices turned out to be a gold mine for law enforcement, so we can be glad for that.

Having their own servers would not have helped them in that regard. In fact, had they not had the advantages inherent in cloud servers, their lackadaisical approaches to security would have exposed their users to even more mayhem. So they would have been shut down one way or the other.