Windows Dedicated Servers vs. Virtual Private Servers

Posted: May 9th, 2012 by Mike Hardy 10 Comments

Windows Dedicated Server

In the past a dedicated windows server was the foundation for any major website that broke from being an idea to a viable business.  Of course this has always been a fairly significant jump in cost from your low cost shared hosting options.  But once you make the jump a dedicated server provides unparalleled stability and configuration because you have direct access to the machine.

Unfortunately you pay the price.

Dedicated servers typically start at 10-100 times that of a shared hosting account.  You're also stuck on a single physical machine.  It beats sharing that machine with someone but when you need to upgrade or move servers the long dark night begins.

Virtual Private Servers

But a new age is here : Virtual Private Servers.  All the benefits of a dedicated server, a fraction of the price, and none of the downsides.  With a VPS you get an entire virtual server all to yourself.  You connect to it via RDP, like you would a normal dedicated server.  You configure it any way you'd like, just like a dedicated server.  You share it with no one, just like, yeah, a dedicated server.

But... a VPS is not a single physical machine running in a data center.  If you need more memory you don't need to get out a screwdriver.  Want more and faster CPUs?  The agonizing prospect of setting up a new box and moving everything over doesn't exist.  Single point of equipment failure?  Eliminated.

In the world of VPS all this changes.  Here are a few benefits of going VPS instead of a dedicated server:

  • Price : A fraction of a dedicated server.  Slightly higher than the lowest cost shared hosting, but, well, it's not crappy shared hosting.  Prices for our Epic Win servers start at $19/month.
  • Elastic : Upgrade or downgrade your instance at anytime.  Need more CPU?  Your instance can be spun down, changed, then spun back up giving you more memory and more CPU power in a matter of minutes.
  • Simple & Fast : Click 'Create Instance' and in minutes you'll have a full blown virtual server at your disposal.
  • Pre-configured : Know you want IIS and SQL Server?  Or maybe WordPress?  How about Orchard or DotNetNuke?  Just select that image and your new instance will spin up pre-configured.
  • Redundant : Data written to your drives is replicated across multiple servers across multiple facilities automagically.
  • Reliable : Your instances run in Amazon's highly reliable environment that provides 99.95% availability.
  • Full Server Backup : Backing up your entire server can be done automatically.  In the VPS world these are called snapshots and contain an exact copy of your entire server.  Not just a database backup or a few meta files.  The entire server.  These snapshots can be used to bring up an identical server in minutes.

Virtual Private Servers.  The inexpensive, elastic, reliable hosting of the future.  At least that's what our robots tell us.

Wanna give it a shot?   Try out an Epic Win Server for free for a month.  Seriously, free.  Start here:

Epic Win Signup

and enter FREEVPS for your Coupon Code.  That'll give you the first month free to try it out.

(details about the free month can be found here)

  • http://blog.andrei.rinea.ro/ Andrei Rinea

    No downsides?! That's fishy.

  • Anonymous

    We don't think there is. Differences, absolutely.  And there are pro's and con's to everything but given the enormous benefits the cloud offers and the maturity of Amazon's infrastructure we think it's the way to go.

  • Anonymous

    An important downside is the dramatic decrease in RAM that you get on a VPS compared with a dedicated. Common sizes for dedicated range from 2-4GB+, while common sizes for a VPS range from 400-800MB+. If your handle a lot of traffic and/or processing (databases, dns, etc), even 1GB of ram won't cut it, and certainly not MB of RAM. Big difference.

    • Anonymous

      Memory is definitely something you should be aware of but that's not entirely true if you compare apples to apples.  Yes, the smallest instance is only 613MB of memory but it's less than $20/mo.  You'd be hard pressed to find any dedicated server for that price.

      If you scale up to a VPS with 3.75GB RAM you're looking at around $150/mo which is very comparable to dedicated machines.  There are of course many other factors - storage, cpu, etc. but taken all together their actually isn't as big of a difference as you might think.

      Plus, and this is not to be understated, if you need to scale up to more memory (or CPU) it only takes a few minutes on a VPS.  A dedicated server could take hours, days, or may not even be possible without moving servers entirely.

  • John Meyer

    As the world's dominant operating system, a Windows hosting solution is a safe choice for compatibility and ease of use on either dedicated servers or virtual machines.

  • ctrls

    As the world's dominant operating system, a Windows hosting solution is a
    safe choice for compatibility and ease of use on either dedicated
    servers.

  • E M E

    Unlike dedicated servers VPS shares the same machines which is the reason it goes for lower cost... try having one on a crowded machine... even with as much ram as u can get and all the boosts available it will still cause slowdowns and any ddos attack on the machine your VPS is on will effect you even if you weren't targeted...

  • Sathya

    Well got some little knowledge between virtual private servers and windows dedicated server.

  • http://www.hostv.com/ virtual private servers

    A virtual private server is a dedicated server that
    has been divided into separate virtual containers, each containing a virtual
    server that is private from the others.

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