[msbarnett]

I've pointed this out to people on numerous occasions, and the push-back I always get is concerns about timely provisioning if they ever need more capacity and/or new servers in case of catastrophe.

OVH et al can get you servers quickly if they have them "in stock", but supply fluctuates wildly, especially on the cheaper end.

[mwpmaybe]

Just being able to programmatically provision a server at a moment's notice—even in normal day-to-day (i.e. non-catastrophic) situations—is a critical tool in my toolbelt.

You can take a snapshot of a VM, you can move it to a different host, you can spin up a new instance to test a major upgrade, you can clone a cluster for a few hours of testing, you can scale up and down...