[rubinelli]

Virtualization removed much of the appeal of running a small, power-efficient physical server. If you want a low-powered server, you just take a slice of a much bigger one. And if you don't need to run it 24/7, you can simply stop it and "spin it up" later.

[jkldotio]

Also in many VPS slices you have a guaranteed amount of compute power but when the others aren't using the CPU you can use more, burstable RAM allocations too, whereas a dedicated blade trying to compete with a Linode slice will have hard limits. While that doesn't apply to all use cases it's a fairly common one.