Shameless plug time! My own company, Uptano, is doing something kind of neat with dedicated servers. We're letting you rent dedicated hardware and then launch multiple virtual servers on them.
I've been keeping my eye on Uptano, they've come a long way since I played with the initial beta. I really like the idea of having a dedicated box and being able to allocate VMs within it.
Question: Do all my 8 VSs have to reside on the same host? If the host goes down, it will take all my VSs with it. Any way of getting the same number of VSs but distributed across hosts?
Virtual servers on Uptano are managed via the web interface and each includes a public IP address. Most ISPs do limit IPs per server. Also, our limits are higher than pretty much anyone needs per server.
It's far easier to manage than doing it manually. We're also making it easier to do high level things with your servers that aren't trivial to do manually.
https://uptano.com
We're not trying to be the absolute cheapest, just trying to be the company we wished to exist.