Servers are like a box of chocolates
Ok, not really. But I did think of something I thought had a lot of insight. Servers are actually like a carburetor... Anybody can buy them; anybody can install them, but it takes somebody with highly toned skills to make that server as efficient as possible and accomplish what you expect.
You can tune a carburetor to do a number of things. You can make it super efficient and have less power or you can make it a gas guzzling power house; or for that matter anywhere in between.
With servers you can make something that is just raw power and brute strength with just the bare essentials or the "perfect" installation of preferred software packages. But sometimes flexibility outweighs brute strength.
Recent projects I have been working on have come under a lot of criticism for using software packages that tie up system resources. My argument: If you could have one server that can bash PHP requests out all day long and not shed a drip of sweat or twenty servers that can work twenty different tasks and functions all at blazing speeds, which would you want?