@rastilin Sure, it's cheaper.... Until a hard drive fails at 3 am or you unexpectedly need to scale up. And of course once you've scaled up you can't trivially scale back down again because you may be stuck with a minimum lease/commitment.

Not to mention all the administrative overhead of having to run a hypervisor for virtual machines and all that jazz yourself.

There certainly is a point at which dedicated hardware makes sense, but for a professional setup imo it comes much later.