If you have a dozen customers on a server that cannot access things because of an issue, then as a startup, without a whole customer support department, you're literally screwed.
I've been on HN long enough to have seen plenty of companies get complaints after growing too quickly and not being able to handle the issues they run into.
I'm building this business in a way to de-risk things as much as possible. From getting the best equipment I can buy today, to support contracts, to the best data center to just scaling with revenue growth. This isn't a cost issue, it is a long term viability issue.
Home lab... certainly cut as many corners as you want. Cloud service provider building top super computers for rent... not so much. There is a reason why not a lot of people start to do this... it is extremely capital intensive. That is a huge moat and getting the relationships and funding to do what I'm doing isn't easy and took me over 5 years to get to this point of just getting started. I'm not going to blow it all on cutting corners on some used equipment.