> Until very recently, while money was still very cheap, the time overhead it would take to manage this just was not worth the cost savings.

You can also rent a whole server. There's not much difference in time in managing a VM in a cloud or a whole server you rent from someone. Depending on the vendor, maybe some more setup time, since low end hosts don't usually have great setup workflows, so maybe you need to fiddle with the ipmi console once or twice to get it started, but if you go with a higher tier provider, you can fully automate everything if that floats your boat. It's just bare metal rather than a VM, and typically much lower cost for sustained usage (if you're really scaling up signfigantly and down throughout the day, cloud costs can work out less, although some vendors offer bare metal by the hour, too)