EC2/cloud has much more buzz and perceived* transparency compared to dedicated servers that the latter tends to get written off. But at the end of the day, you'

EC2/cloud has much more buzz and perceived* transparency compared to dedicated servers that the latter tends to get written off. But at the end of the day, you're still just dealing with servers in a data center. If there's better performance at a better price, wouldn't you want to know and be able to take advantage of it? *Because of the nature of virtual, you really don't know what kind of actual performance you'll get for your money. Depends on the physical system it's running on, how many other instances are also on that server, what their load is like, etc.