>...  The premise is that in the long-run it will be cheaper to invest in the
>needed items up front, rather than pay an ISP for space and later have to
>bite the bullet. ...
 
I would be interested in knowing how you know that.  Did you
figure the life-cycle cost including conversion, upgrades,
growth, performance, maintenance, problem resolution, staffing,
network availability, network bandwidth?
 
My guess is that it is cheaper for an ISP to provide the
incremental load of running your WEB server and services rather
than you providing it from scratch.
 
Of course it would depend upon which ISP no doubt.
 
/Pete Weiss