No-one has mentioned mixed hosting, whereby you pick from each category. Something like Varnish you want a lot of RAM for, dedicated suits that well. Web serv

No-one has mentioned mixed hosting, whereby you pick from each category. Something like Varnish you want a lot of RAM for, dedicated suits that well. Web servers tend to be numerous and are just computational power (stitch all this gubbins together and return a string), their number vary according to demand and they suit virtual servers really well. Now databases, these really need good disks, lots of RAM, decent CPUs. They are best dedicated or colocated. When things go wrong with a database server you really want to be able to rule out the invisible magic of other hosts, and the voodoo of being a virtual machine. The best thing I can hope for whilst I scale is to find a provider that will sell me dedicated and public cloud instances that can live on the same VLan and still be reasonably priced. I'm currently still totally with Linode, but with 9 instances, and an over-heated database server I know I'm getting close to the limits of what I can do there without re-focusing on splitting up the app when I could be adding new features.