Can anyone with experience of deploying CPU intensive applications into 'cloud' environments (like e.g. Linode), comment on whether these environments have been suitable?
It seems to me that with VPS/Cloud hosting, specifications like RAM, Disk space, network, are very well defined, whereas CPU power is rather more of a grey area. And when you need to move to a more powerful machine, you often seem to have to up everything (memory, disk space etc.) - which quickly gets expensive...
So, are these environments appropriate, our would dedicated servers be the more cost effective route?
EDIT:
To clarify, I'm talking about constantly high CPU usage patterns.