Cheap dedicated servers versus virtual private servers

As I was surfing the internet as usual, I noticed that there are plenty of sites dealing with virtual private servers. Most of them explain what VPS are, how they work, and some of them provide information on their advantages and disadvantages. However, I noticed that none of the websites I visited offered practical information, i.e. information that can be effectively used to make a decision or to adequately asses the pros and cons of VPS in comparison to other hosting possibilities.

It’s useful to know about VPS, but if you cannot compare it versus other hosting solutions, then you can’t actually see what’s good for your specific online business and what’s not. So I decided to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of virtual private servers, not by providing hard definitions and a cold list of features, but actually by listing the differences with other available hosting alternatives. In this case, I’m going to compare the goods and the bads of virtual private servers against cheap dedicated servers.

The goods

The first thing that gets people’s attention is the price of VPS. Less expensive than dedicated servers, VPS are a good choice for those people who are looking to set up a website that will be complex enough to render a shared hosting solution useless, but that will not yet deal with a large amount of visitors or huge database needs, and therefore won’t require the full power of a dedicated server.

VPS’s capabilities and features make them very similar to dedicated servers in certain aspects, especially when it comes to software and custom-made component installation. In this sense, VPS are as flexible as dedicated servers, allowing a much deeper control of advanced administrative tasks, like configuration and assignment of resources.

The independent, isolated, standalone nature of virtual private servers makes them ideal for testing purposes: a website can be fully tested in a VPS by a small group of people before it is made available for the general public. This also makes them suitable for testing software applications, especially those made for servers; and to securely run software that is suspected of being malicious or contain viruses. For this reason, virtual private servers are vastly used in companies’ intranets.

The bads

The disadvantages of a VPS become visible when dealing with high-demanding sites. Since a virtual private server is essentially a form of shared server, the resources of the physical hosting computer are all the hosted VPS, which may lead to an unbalance in the bandwidth and processor power if one of these VPS is in a heavy load condition, or is aggressively performing hardware-eager tasks like very complex calculations or big-bulk database operations.

Also, it is important to keep in mind that virtual private servers are often created in bulks, with a single computer hosting a lot of them. In extreme conditions (i.e. when a computer hosts too many VPS), this may force the system to work very close to its limits, decreasing the durability of the hardware components.

As I always say, every solution has its pros and cons, and the first thing you should do before you choose your hosting plan is to take your own business’ present and future requirements into consideration.

See you around!

Stefan Holm
Dedicated Server Advisor Team