Most providers have some sort of KVM you can use without needing to drive over there.

Granted - I don't know what Luke was running on this "server", but it sounds like it was an old school single machine setup and not some ephemeral k8s cluster or anything, so IMO I'd still like to know why he wasn't using FDE. Perhaps his hosting company doesn't have FDE, but that's a good reason not to use them IMO

e.g. https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/use-luks-for-full-disk-encryption/