(Reseller Web Hosting) ' Making the decision between a VPS and a dedicated server should involve the decision making process. A dedicated server has benefits over a VPS and vice-versa. A real dedicated server requires a real hardware server that stands alone to handle the websites requests. A VPS is a virtual private server that handles both your requests and requests from other customers of the Web service host. You share a VPS with other people in order to get the best bang for your buck. Now, when it comes down to determining what your needs are, you should consider your wants and needs. What do you require your website to do for you as far as performance is concerned? Obviously, if you are sharing a VPS with other customers of your Web host, you're going to experience less speed and access time performance. This is because a VPS has to handle all the requests from the other customers as well.

A dedicated server will be much faster should you ever need the performance demand. However, a dedicated server usually costs a lot more. So, now is the time to break things down and take a look at what each of the options really offers. If you have a website that makes a substantial profit and serves a great deal of customers every day, then a dedicated server is probably going to be your best option. But, if you run a smaller scale website that doesn't have a lot of resource demands, then you can probably safely deliver your site to customers using a Virtual Private Server.

A Virtual Private Server has all the same options and functions that a dedicated server does. You still get access to your cPanel and can accomplish every task that a dedicated server does. The only difference is the performance level of the server itself. Some people elect to take a test drive of Web hosting services by signing up for a month worth of service of both a dedicated server and VPS to decide which one works better for them. This prevents them from making a costly purchasing mistake and signing up for a years contract (or more).

In order to really know whether or not you can benefit from a dedicated server and VPS, you have to gauge the performance requirements of your website. Keeping an eye on your overall processor usage, bandwidth usage and database access times will allow you to understand how choosing between the two could improve your website or online business.

For example, let's say that you own a market place website that gets 100,000 hits per day. You are currently using a Virtual Private Server to handle the work load but have been considering the switch to a dedicated server. Instead of blindly making a purchasing decision, you decide to analyze your Web statistics to gain a better understanding of how the choice will affect your business. You notice that your website seems slow at times but much faster a few hours later. This is one of the tell-tale signs that you need to switch to a dedicated server. These servers are there to serve your website alone and will never have periodic spans of slow access times because of other customers on the server. Because of the slow access times and poor server performance, you decide to switch to a dedicated server.

Because this client is making so much money with their website, the cost of using a dedicated server actually increases the profit margin. In our next example the exact opposite is true.

Using another example, a Web hosting customer who is currently using a dedicated server notices that he or she could save money by switching to a VPS. The website doesn't get very many hits and the decision to use a dedicated server was a bad move in the first place. So, using the same Web host, the customer makes the switch to a VPS the same day. The site is back up and running within a few hours and the speed is just as fast as it was before. The difference is, the customer ended up saving hundreds of dollars in comparison to what they were paying for the dedicated server. The site wasn't very resource intensive to start with and only had about 5,000 visitors per month. This is an example of where a VPS could save a customer a lot of money over the expensive cost of using a dedicated server.

So, you see, in both instances of our examples, a customer can make a wise hosting decision simply by understanding the resource usage of their website. Usually, a hosting analyst will be able to tell you whether or not you will run into problems with a VPS and when a dedicated server would be a wise purchasing decision.