In reply to Rick.

Today, dedicated servers will often give you better value in terms of raw resources, but what I am focusing on is the way in which the far more granular level of VPS hosting allows us to do radically different things. Looking years ahead, I am not particularly worried about cost because that will continue to become a less and less significant part of the equation, I am more interested in how ever-improving server tools allow us to push human involvement (by far the most expensive cost) further up the value chain i.e. allow intelligent people to work on site design and content, rather than worry about site deployment etc.