For most clients I work with (who often have this "oh but shouldn't we use AWS, they're the best right?" attitude) even a few rented VPS (i.e. on shared hardware) is sufficient.
I'm a big fan of the way some providers like Rimu allow more control, which helps with scaling up - by default most customers just use one or more Xen VM's on shared physical hosts, but you have the option to rent dedicated hardware (either existing stock, or custom orders), and then you can run one or more VMs - without noisy neighbour concerns.
The "single vm on a host" seems weird to most people at first, until you realise that it allows you to migrate the VM between physical hosts.
Sure, the new hotness is servers-as-cattle and we should just provision a new instance, but that doesn't always work for smaller outfits.
For most clients I work with (who often have this "oh but shouldn't we use AWS, they're the best right?" attitude) even a few rented VPS (i.e. on shared hardware) is sufficient.
I'm a big fan of the way some providers like Rimu allow more control, which helps with scaling up - by default most customers just use one or more Xen VM's on shared physical hosts, but you have the option to rent dedicated hardware (either existing stock, or custom orders), and then you can run one or more VMs - without noisy neighbour concerns.
The "single vm on a host" seems weird to most people at first, until you realise that it allows you to migrate the VM between physical hosts.
Sure, the new hotness is servers-as-cattle and we should just provision a new instance, but that doesn't always work for smaller outfits.