Like the blog says, CPU is fairly cheap on the cloud. Memory is fairly expensive and normally good disk IO cannot be purchased (Bytemark's BigV looks different in this regard). We have a service (http://www.mynaweb.com/) that has a bunch of mostly CPU bound services and a few IO bound ones. We also want the CPU bound services to be near to customers. It makes sense for us to acquire cheap cloud instances around the world for the CPU bound services and keep the IO bound stuff on dedicated hosts.