VPS vs Dedicated Server
VPS or dedicated server will always be considered when you website grows up. Dedicated server absolutely wins from technical view. But what's exactly good for either product? We have generated a list of comparison between vps and dedicated server with both pros and cons to help with your quick selection.
In order to understand the difference and relationship between the two products, we will focus on following essential points that are mostly concerned by people: server structure, performance, security and costs.
Server structure
A dedicated server is composed by physical hardware resources such as hard drives, RAM card, CPU and power source etc. You have full control of the physical server with complete access to all its resources. As long as the server is setup by your requirements, you can make full use of all available facilities.
VPS is different. While a dedicated server is completely configured on physical hardwares, vps is just created by virtualization softwares like openvz and hyper-v etc. Everything is virtualized from existing server resources. Unlike a dedicated server where you can touch the server hardware directly by hand, everything from vps is non-touchable, you can only see its configuration from virtualization platform.
Performance
A dedicated server has its own physical resources and always can be added in case there's need. No matter how you utilize the resource, you'll not be affected by other people.
A vps server performance completely depends the host server configuration. For example if it has 8GB RAM installed, then the max amound to allocate to vps can never by pass this limit. Because there're always multiple vps instance created on host server, all vps servers are sharing the same dedicated resources. When any of the vps instance uses more, there's less resource left for others. Some critical resources like disk I/O and network bandwidth is strictly limited by host server abilities. If all vps servers are generating big amounts traffic during peak times this can cause some performance degradation or even down time.
Security
For those who require extremely high security protection, dedicated server is absolutely perfect choice. Because everything will be stored on your dedicated server and only you have root access to it. Unless your physical server is stolen from data center space, everything can be secured properly via existing security tactics. The 100% physical resource isolation feature greatly reduced potential security issues that're common from other systems.
VPS is great too but absolutely not so powerful as dedicated server. Because it's virtualized from host server resources by software. Server administrators have full access to every vps. As long as the host server is hacked, all vps platforms are actually dead. Even there's no such hacking issue, you don't wish host support to access your server space either in case you keep something really great in the space.
We had a client who sells commercial dotnetnuke skins and modules before, he tried shared and vps but he always found his property being compromised by other people. He then switched to dedicated server and no such issue happened. I can't say if it's the problem of host company or just because of a powerful hacker. But a dedicated server solved the problem perfectly.
Costs
Dedicated server is much more expensive than vps for all its advantages. No matter what kind of dedicated server you would like to deal with, it will always cost you more than vps solutions because you get all dedicated resource. VPS is affordable choice before you have to use a dedicated server. You get a full functional server system as well with allocated resources.
Here's a table list view between vps and dedicated server
| Server plan | VPS | Dedicated |
| Hardware | virtualized from dedicated server | 100% physical hardware |
| Server OS | limited choice | any system can be supported |
| Security | medium | high |
| Performance | good | perfect |
| Flexibility | you can optimize a specific service for vps by application needs without paying that much for a dedicated server | |
| Cost | low | high |
Although VPS is not so powerful as a dedicated server, it's good service to practise your server management skills before you work with a dedicated version. A VPS is configured full functional like a dedicated server so you can learn server services side by side. Also, with the fast tech development, most server products are going cloud. Most cloud servers are actually created as VPS with flexible resource and performance. When you evaluate if to work with a vps or dedicated server, make sure to check about your future growth and needs.
