>Well, I would go for the dedicated hardware. CPU might be assigned for the full 100% to you, but unfortunately that is only one part, not necessarily your biggest concern. A physical computer still shares the system bus, RAM, network card or SAN solution. And those might affect your performance.
Ok, thanks
>We have chosen to hire an entire box and we are running about a dozen virtual machines on it. We have ultimate control about installing new VMs, restarting them and how resources are shared. You have so much more control and ability to troubleshoot problems when you own the box, that it was not ever a question to us. Of course it is a little more expensive, but the trouble we had with the previous environment where we had a single virtualized server costed us more than it was worth.
That is exactly what the first ISP is selling us.
Yes, my main concern is about troubleshooting. If it goes slow, I want to be sure I am responsible for that. That means, it is something related to our own infrastructure. So, I would not have to troubleshoot something that is caused by someone else.