- You can pick up a refurbished 1u server for $100-$150, for example from geeks.com . That'll get you an older processor, but often 4GB of RAM. Whatever you get will be significantly more powerful than low end VPS's, equivalent to a high-end VPS.

- We're hosting at a facility with excellent connectivity but little technical support. We pay ~$60 per month all in.

So for $200 upfront and $60/month we get the equivalent of a linode 4096, which would cost $160/month.

- We have a similar setup at another data center from another colo provider with semi-hot fail-over, providing both backup and BCP.

I can't figure out why people would go for high-end VPS instead of buying their own hardware and hosting. Is there a hidden benefit I'm missing?