[drsintoma]

They are more expensive, but they are usually easy and immediate to acquire. Which makes provisioning much more efficient in case of fluctuating traffic. And overall sysadmins will have less tendency to over-provision, meaning getting more and beefier machines than it's needed "to be safe".

[RyanZAG]

From the article it sounds like they aren't provisioning for fluctuating traffic and have a fixed set of VMs. Most providers can get you hardware within a couple hours in any case.

[nacs]

Their historical traffic records are probably good enough to predict how much traffic will be coming in during the different times of the year and they could ramp up or scale down the number of VMs as needed possibly saving them some money.

Also VPS provisioning time is seconds/minutes instead of hours to where they could redeploy to another provider if they suddenly got the boot from one provider. And via Amazon/Digitalocean-type APIs this reprovisioning-on-failure could be fully automated.

[fooyc]

Nothing prevents you from using bare dedicated servers for your usual traffic, and VMs for anything else.

[drsintoma]

In an ideal world yes. Or if your software works already seamlessly cross-datacenter. But in the real world is rare that your hosting provider is good at both VMs and metal. At least that's the biggest problem I've always encountered, specially with budget providers.

[TillE]

This is clearly the ideal setup for most use cases, and I'm somewhat puzzled as to why it's not more common. I guess using only virtual servers is a tiny bit simpler, so companies will just eat the extra cost.