I have always had the luxury of having a dedicated server(s) for whatever I’m working on. I even have a static IP DSL connection from Speakeasy so I can run my own ’stuff’.
Recently, my DSL was out. For 2+ weeks. My family was throwing things at me as our email server was now sitting behind a very dead Internet connection. Uh Ohs!! Our secondary MX started clearing out our queue. Uh OHS!!!
My natural reaction was to go see how dedicated server prices are these days. Very low! But ever the miser, I wanted more, more savings! I soon discovered that the hosting industry has responded by offering virtual private servers. No – I have not been shopping for hosting lately 
I was really impressed by the industry, after that transcendent pride was over, I was saddened by the marketing associated with these accounts.
One of the cool things VPS technology SHOULD let you state is how many VPS customers are on a given box, and what that box has under the hood. It would be great to know I get 1/10th of a quad core Dell with SCSI RAID 5. The hosting company gets to put 10 accounts on that cheapish box, and I get 1/10 of a FAR nicer machine than I wanted to afford on my own.
For whatever reason, the stat that most VPS hosting places advertise as the big differentiator on the packages is RAM allotment (other than the sundry disk and bandwidth allotment). I get this. You throw up apache and mysql and suddenly you have a lot less free RAM on your moderate traffic site. I do NOT get why CPU is any less important. My big complaint against shared hosting is the ability to throw PHP/Perl/Whatever onto the box by just ANYONE. You get 20 or 30 anyones together, one or two are bound to be a bad coder. Really bad. Worse still – malicious. I know the last time I was on a shared hosting account my first inclination was to use find to look for world writable files of interest….
Having said that, I am enjoying my time with Spry VPS. I’ve never used a ‘control panel’ before, but I see the attraction of Plesk/CPanel now. It’s just to quick and easy. Damn lazyness.
With how cheap dedicated hosting is, it makes sense to just go for dedicated hosting, and not deal with issues other users bring to the server. I use serverpronto for the server that I run. I would rather pay a little more for a dedicated server over a vps any day.
I agree in general. I just wanted to save $100/year since i don’t approach needing a dedicated modernish server. If I take any of my projects to production, I will surely IMMEDIATELY dive head first into dedicated machines : )
Moore’s Law = the bomb.
Thanks for reading!
I absolutely love my host and have been with them for over 5 years. They are Jumpline.com. I found them by analyzing Netcraft and finding the host with the least client turnover and least downtime. They were number one.
I’m also an affiliate of theirs now. If you’d like, you can subscribe to my RSS feed and there’s an advertisement for 1 year of free hosting. Trust me, you won’t regret it!
Doug
VPS is one of the best options to start with even if you have the budget to buy a dedicated Box for your site. You can confirm the quality of service from your hosting provider before migrating to a Dedicated. But if you are 100% sure of the services and your hosting requirements then ideally you should go with a dedicated BOX.