[IanSmithISA]

Good morning,

I have a Hyper V-VPS here which is the latest Windows implementation and it's resource hungry even for Windows, so Linux users can smile a little.

The biggest drawback to having a VPS over a dedicated server is not the inherent constraints of a virtualisation, these are fairly obvious if you read up on the subject, but the constraints imposed by the needs of a commercial host against what you want to pay as a customer and the fact that VPSs are still a relatively new technology.

In a cheap web hosting context if you have a VPS everything that you are doing is contrary to the expectations of the people writing the software that you are using.

What I mean by this is the developers of the OS and most applications that you will be using have a certain mind set, I am a developer and I have it too. That is, if you are running Windows Sever 2008 then you will obviously have a big disc, it's a server after all.

However a VPS may offer 20GB or 30GB of disc space, which at first glance appears plenty, (my first hard disc was 1MB!), as mentioned only a couple of posts back I ran out of disc space on 20GB disc despite having an almost empty site. Windows has gobbled up 11GB excluding the Swap File, a big Windows update was about 2GB and it needed working storage and there wasn't enough.

People developing for Windows server just don't expect to come up against 20GB drives any more, so will quite happily grab 5GB of disc space.

The same tends to be true for memory, if you bought a server to run Windows 2008 you would just buy 4GB of RAM as its so cheap, but a host offering say 15 VPS on a physical server would need to have 60GB of RAM in the server to be able to offer this. Servers that can take this much RAM tend to be very very expensive so the temptation is to offer 512MB, 1GB or 2GB. Again contrary to what the developers will be expecting as a typical capacity for a server.

There is also a second issue that is not related to the technology at all, if your are going for one VPS with a hosting company there is a likelihood that you will just accept certain pieces of software like a Control Panel that you have no experience of but are normally recommended by the hosting company. These apps can consume far more resources that you imagine, so a hardware configuration that makes sense in your office, fails to run once you add these extras. This is more important with a VPS as I have suggested that the hardware is already underspecified.

In summary; unless you are very careful you will probably under-specify the VPS hardware for the software that you are running and because of this you will hit problems that you simply wouldn't hit on a dedicated server because you would never buy a dedicated server of the same specifications.

Unless you are on a shoe string (like I am), the price differences between a VPS and a dedicated server has closed some much, just look at the prices here, that the VPS is bad idea.

Bye

Ian