Originally Posted by rowan

I think you're asking why a "high end" VPS costs so much more than a medium to high end dedicated? Just a natural progression in the VPS pricing table, I guess. For every doubling in price, one or more of cores/RAM/disk also doubles.

One other major benefit is that a cloud VPS can be claimed at released at will. Paying $480/mo for a VPS (this is an actual product) probably isn't too smart, but if you only need it to do some heavy database crunching for a few hours a month, paying $5 per month for short usage of a mega instance is going to be much cheaper than having dedicated hw sitting idle for most of the time.