This is one of the keys reasons I recently started my new project, Uptano (shameless plug: https://uptano.com https://uptano.com), and all servers use dedicated

This is one of the keys reasons I recently started my new project, Uptano (shameless plug: https://uptano.com https://uptano.com), and all servers use dedicated RAID 1 (two drives) with 10K RPM or SSD storage. The same issue applies to network performance. I've seen very expensive EC2 instances that couldn't even push 50 Mbit/s to the net, while instances of the same type could at least do a few hundred Mbit/s. AWS' answer was always to simply buy even more expensive instances, so less people are sharing, but that's a terribly costly answer. I'm doing bonded (802.3ad) 2x1 Gbit/s connections on all servers, because that's what I wish EC2 had. Multiple customers, with highly varied workloads, sharing the same physical server hardware is simply a fundamentally flawed idea. IMHO, it only makes sense to use a VPS for very small personal projects, where you don't want to justify ~$140/mo in server costs. EC2 was a really novel thing and it brought lots of great technology to the scene, but they made a few fundamentally wrong choices.