They are more expensive, but they are usually easy and immediate to acquire. Which makes provisioning much more efficient in case of fluctuating traffic. And overall sysadmins will have less tendency to over-provision, meaning getting more and beefier machines than it's needed "to be safe".

From the article it sounds like they aren't provisioning for fluctuating traffic and have a fixed set of VMs. Most providers can get you hardware within a couple hours in any case.

Their historical traffic records are probably good enough to predict how much traffic will be coming in during the different times of the year and they could ramp up or scale down the number of VMs as needed possibly saving them some money.

Also VPS provisioning time is seconds/minutes instead of hours to where they could redeploy to another provider if they suddenly got the boot from one provider. And via Amazon/Digitalocean-type APIs this reprovisioning-on-failure could be fully automated.

Nothing prevents you from using bare dedicated servers for your usual traffic, and VMs for anything else.

In an ideal world yes. Or if your software works already seamlessly cross-datacenter. But in the real world is rare that your hosting provider is good at both VMs and metal. At least that's the biggest problem I've always encountered, specially with budget providers.

This is clearly the ideal setup for most use cases, and I'm somewhat puzzled as to why it's not more common. I guess using only virtual servers is a tiny bit simpler, so companies will just eat the extra cost.

I think TPB specifically might save money:

1) Hardware seizure expenses vs LEOs duplicating the hdd of a virt.

2) TPB needs to locate in disparate jurisdictions to take advantages of different legal situations. That would involve a ton of shipping costs, probably more lost hardware, and paying for remote hands

3) They had been paying a premium for 'bulletproof' hosting.

For real, their dedicated hosting costs are most likely not going to be at all comparable to the ones most people commonly get quoted. Hosting costs go up when your host runs out of a former Cold War bunker.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker

You need CyberBunker if you need your host to protect you.

If you have 20 servers in 20 different providers, who don't know who they are hosting, you don't need this.

Renting a dedicated server doesn't involve any of this.

There are dedicated server providers in every part of the world, including MPAA-proof countries.

There are almost no MPAA-proof countries, its pretty hard to hide from billion dollar companies with lobbyists and legal teams who are effectively above the law/make the laws. Countries that do ignore international copyright laws(Russia, China, Iran, pretty much any South American country) are usually very expensive to get a dedicated server in and have unreliable networks and piss-poor speeds. On top of that they have their own set of content laws(Russia and China censor anything that they perceive as against their government and jail/execute those who create and facilitate its distribution, good luck hosting anything in a muslim country that opposes Islam see:pretty much anything fun).

Sweden and Holland used to be considered anti-copyright havens, but the movie/recording industry mafia eventually pressured them into passing legislation that squashed this.

The only countries where you could operate in and be reasonably copyright resistant are Iceland and Switzerland, because they are non-EU members and have great data protection laws as of now. Dedicated servers there are quite overpriced though.

What's the MPAA proof country? The US has a lot of influence, and they've very obviously pressured other countries into action against TPB.