[Sembiance]

Amazon Web Services and other cloud vendors. The amount of traffic and processing power a single dedicated server can provide is astonishingly cheaper than the cloud.

I understand that the cloud provides additional software products, services and flexibility to scale quick, but you pay for it.

[juangacovas]

Yeah. The only thing I miss from bare metal server setups is the managed redundancy some clouds offer (massive RAID cabinets, etc).

But on most projects, if you plan for contingencies you can do well on bare metal using HAProxy for Load Balancing, database replication, lsyncd for some filesystems, etc. AWS is really a good commodity but more and more people complain on price ;P