Yeah, you are probably right. Because of Java's popularity and high demand, hosting providers have to be Java-ready and nowadays, it's not a problem.
However, it seems I've been living in a cave. Besides the Reddit case, I haven't heard (or at least can't remember) about problems running a CL environment. Can people who had this problem please reply - what disto, what implementation, what was the issue?
My experience trying to move some code from SBCL/OS X to a particular version of Linux is partially documented here.
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/0450136edf...
The use case was a final class project, where the instructor needed to be able to run the final version of the program just by executing a script in an unpacked tar file. Couldn't get SBCL to run with the limited time I spent on it. Got CMUCL to run, but not in a way that could be deployed in a self installing manner. Punted and used Java (was easier to work with team members that way, too).
Clojure would have been perfect.
It's not necessarily a fault of SBCL, as much as it is a function of Java's popularity. But to say they equally share deployment problems seems a bit misguided to me.