In 2006, I was working with a large Canadian managed-hosting service provider. Back then, people were using dedicated servers to host their workloads. Hardware, bandwidth, and management, all came at a high cost. When people were talking about virtualization, we were in a business where it could badly affect sales. Virtualization was able to bring the cost down for hosting. I still remember that there were all sorts of discussions, arguments, articles, blog posts, and summits where people were bringing the pros and cons of virtualization to the table. As with any technology, at the beginning, there were issues, but virtualization technologies developed rapidly, and it brought businesses to a point that they can't look away.
For us, it was the same: businesswise, we were always safe with dedicated server hosting, but with virtualization...