Over the years I’ve gone back and forth between hosting on a virtual server to full metal and back again.
While I’m personally still locked into bare metal (mostly because I’m too lazy to change IP space again), I’ve been working with with Luna Node in Toronto for some of our client server hosting requirements. The Openstack layer is really nice to work with, and the ability to dynamically scale your secondary storage is pretty neat. The pricing models are also quite interesting. It seems all the VPS guys are charging by the hour now instead of by month.
I think it may be time to put some good learning effort into the Openstack API, Swift storage and cross-compatibility with Amazon S3/Glacier.
PS: If you are interested in signing up with Luna Node, feel free to use my referral link (https://dynamic.lunanode.com/info.php?r=870) It will help me out with a few extra hours of run time on the server!