Are you suggesting that someone running in the cloud suddenly has no need of an ops team? This is the danger in drinking the DevOps Kool-aid, assuming that because a developer can manage to not completely fuck-up their dev box they are somehow proficient enough at system administration to manage cloud infra.

Daily snapshots? For the prices listed you could have an actual hot spare running 24x7 and still save money. This also makes surge-up easier and if you ask nicely a lot of decent dedicated hosting providers will let you shrink without holding you to contract terms.