[bobofettfett]

From my experience renting more servers with 50% growth is a challenge. A lot of things go wrong when installing a lot of servers each month.

Also from my experience, with 10 instances the money you save with custom servers is negligible and contract and SLA management, multi datacenter etc. is easier with a cloud provider than renting servers. At least where I've rented servers in the past.

[Negitivefrags]

I'm not sure where you see a difference between a VM and physical hardware when it comes to provisioning.

Sure, the physical hardware takes 1 hour rather than 1 minute to spin up, but the process is otherwise entirely identical.

[chx]

1 hour? Welcome to 2015! OVH spins your server up in two minutes.