[catdog]

I agree, using dedicated hardware is certainly nice and has some advantages over VMs. It's not only a big thing in the future but also at present, companies like OVH or Hetzner seem to do well despite the rising of the "Cloud".

You exactly know what you get performance wise, e.g. no bad influence from some random neighboring VM. Security is also a concern with virtualization, isolation between VMs turned out to be not that perfect as desired. You can also roll your own virtualization exactly tailored to your needs. "Cloud" VMs also tend to be rather expensive if you need them continuously, you pay for the flexibility they provide.