Another dumb question ... for "several thousand an hour" I could buy a pretty decent server myself ... last time I checked (on https://yourdatafitsinram.net/) the largest physical server there was like 10 grand.

Combine that with the ability to actually throttle a physical server (ie you only pay what you actually use, not per hour) ... I guess I would propose the following scaling strategy:

1. get cheap physical server 2. get your software up and running 3. get a second physical server that is roughly twice as capable 4. use that second server as a "beta" and development server ... do a lot of profiling there 5. once your real world usage spike on the first server routinely reach 80-90%, switch production over to the bigger server 6. get a new development server that is twice as beefy as the former development server