> as a hobbyist, what i would like to see is a hosting provider that will boot fs images (including bootloader) that user builds on users own computer. i.e., provider gives exact specs of machine and network details. user builds and sends fs image to provider and provider boots from it on some bare metal in a datacenter.

This is actually somewhat possible with linode. It's not easy to do but it's possible.

https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/disk-images/migrating-a...