Many people are still going to need or want to be really careful about selecting the best value. So the question is, if you rent say an 8GB VPS from Rackspace, Digital Ocean, Linode, or something similar, how inconsistent is the performance actually? And given that measurement, will the presumably somewhat more expensive "on metal" be a good value?

I'm not even considering EC2 because I don't trust the reliability and I know that its not a good value compared to the others. EC2 only makes sense to me if you really need to take advantage of features they have like the private networking or DynamoDB etc.