Actually the issue is maximum amount of RAM, not CPU power. 2x 12-core Opterons gives you 24 2Ghz cores out of the box, with up to 128 or 256GB of RAM.
ayup. I've looked into renting out small ARM servers rather than VPSs, and the biggest thing stopping me is that the ram is not socketed, and all the boards I can get are made for client boxes (e.g. not enough ram, and too much video hardware driving up the cost.) I mean, in the hosting industry, we expect to pay off our hardware in something like four months, and unless you are a lot better at marketing than I am, it's difficult to charge a whole lot more than $20 per gigabyte of ram per month, so the total cost for the unit (including cpu and disk) has to be around $80 for every gigabyte of ram or so. right now, the panda board looks like the best choice, and even before disk you are looking at almost $200 for something with a power supply, etc..
Also, nobody makes a reasonable power backplane (so I can power 10 or what have you of these little pandaboards off one power supply.)
If these things took DIMMs or the like, the ram problem would be solved. (Really, I'd want ecc, which isn't usually available in SODIMMs, but I bet there are enough people who don't care to sell such a service even without ECC.)
But for now, virtualizing larger servers is a better idea. If you are that concerned about others stepping on you, it's possible to dedicate a disk to a particular virtual server alone; that would solve the biggest resource contention problems that come with virtualization.
Also, nobody makes a reasonable power backplane (so I can power 10 or what have you of these little pandaboards off one power supply.)
If these things took DIMMs or the like, the ram problem would be solved. (Really, I'd want ecc, which isn't usually available in SODIMMs, but I bet there are enough people who don't care to sell such a service even without ECC.)
But for now, virtualizing larger servers is a better idea. If you are that concerned about others stepping on you, it's possible to dedicate a disk to a particular virtual server alone; that would solve the biggest resource contention problems that come with virtualization.