Well yes, because a lot of hosting companies claim 100+ customer VMs per machine. Pretty sure Linode and Digital Ocean run somewhere in that neighborhood. So

Well yes, because a lot of hosting companies claim 100+ customer VMs per machine. Pretty sure Linode and Digital Ocean run somewhere in that neighborhood. So if you just run on a beefy bare metal server yourself, you can probably serve 50-100x as much traffic as you could on a typical VM. I guess the issue is that your software is probably not written to make use of the full machine. You might have to start 50 copies of a process, which might be OK. Ruby, node.js, and Python will probably neat that treatment.