As you say disk IO is a sore point with VPSes but it's something that in many cases isn't an issue or at worst can be worked around. Many websites have product

As you say disk IO is a sore point with VPSes but it's something that in many cases isn't an issue or at worst can be worked around. Many websites have production rigs involving DB machines with a lot of memory, web workers that rarely do IO and files stored in CDNs or S3 so the disk problems are less of an issue. As you point out though when your dataset fiscally or practically won't fit in RAM then disk IO catches up to you and I'd certainly appreciate an SSD's random seek time. It's also important to remember development becomes an entirely different beast with cloud infrastructure though. Even the best tested and reviewed code can't approximate all the variables in production so being able to launch an exact mirror of your production rig and throw recorded traffic at it becomes an amazing test. This is something not feasible in the past.