Very expensive, unless you only need to use it during peak traffic hours. A month runs you over 700$, and I'm renting a dual quad core with 32GB of RAM, plus bandwidth for 450$ right now.

If your load has predictable peaks it may make a lot of sense to spin up 1 quadruple extra large server rather than the equivalent number of large instances, particularly if you're talking about something like a memcached server.

Where from if you don't mind me asking?

A small-ish company called 478east(www.478east.com). They offer relatively cheap high-end hardware in their LA point of presence, but lack a fancy control panel like SoftLayer.

Their $450/mo offering seems to have only 8GB RAM.

It's a custom order, they don't list everything they offer, you have to ask.

Can anyone explain the odd size choices? I've never done any cloud stuff, or even much local virtualization, but I would have expected sized on the low side or equal to an even number (32gb, 64gb) rather than a little higher.

A maxed out Gainestown server has 72GB of RAM (due to the triple-channel memory controller) and after subtracting Xen overhead you get these numbers.