Are you saying you yourself do this? You're using BSD, running in VGA textmode, from which you run qemu with -nographic to load an image of another OS? You yourself are doing this?
Most of "major VPS providers" I know use Linux, not BSD. (Yes, there are some exceptions but the reliance on Linux is almost universal.)
I would love it if you were right and I am wrong, but I seriously doubt you have tested this recently. I will happily give Qemu another go if you have tested this recently and it worked.
So you are admitting you have not tested this and you are just going by what you read.
When was the last time you used any "smaller Unices"?
Anyway, even if the problems with -nographic on x86 have been fixed on other non-FreeBSD BSD's (and I have my doubts), my comment that compiling qemu has become a substantial undertaking still stands. I suspect you've probably never even tried compiling it yourself but that will not stop you from commenting.
I compile Bochs statically on low powered computers with no problems. Cannot say the same for Qemu. Even you're not using x11 they expect you to have x11 libraries at compile time. As with most programs that grow so large, there are more than a few dependencies one can do without.
Most of "major VPS providers" I know use Linux, not BSD. (Yes, there are some exceptions but the reliance on Linux is almost universal.)
I would love it if you were right and I am wrong, but I seriously doubt you have tested this recently. I will happily give Qemu another go if you have tested this recently and it worked.