Yes, there certainly are operational reasons to go big with non consumer-grade servers. In many cases, it is warranted. I was only imagining the lower end of infrastructure needs where a provider can get away with consumer grade hardware and achieve substantially lower costs. Say, a provider building their own racks of ITX motherboards with consumer CPUs. I’m sure there are enough Retail SKUs to be purchased in open market for small scale...

I think backblaze did just that with hard drives when they were starting out