I'm guessing you've never spend half an afternoon on a holiday finding an Internet cafe, convincing them to let you run PuTTY and SSHing into your "complete control" server to fix a trivial problem that brought down your app?
Comparing a bus arrival service for a 1/4 million population city with Reddit is .. irrelevant, at best.
I'll take "Google screwed up, it'll be up when it's up" over "I screwed up, I'm dropping everything and scrambling to fix it" any day of the week.
Also just to scope the discussion: I'm not talking about big, important things - those with ops budgets and rotas - I'm talking about small/low-budget/side-project type thing, like the OPs project.
As for effortless scale-up and built-in redundancy, I kind of disagree ... IMHO you cannot scale without complete control. Ask Reddit about it.