Uptime like that in the screenshot isn’t easy to get on a virtual server in a shared environment. One reason is simple: the more moving parts, the more that can fail. The public cloud – VPS, virtual servers, however you label it – has a lot of moving parts. A dedicated server has fewer. For some workloads, that still makes dedicated server hosting the better choice.
How many layers are under your app?
On a typical VPS or cloud instance, your app sits on top of: the guest OS, the hypervisor (Xen, KVM, Hyper-V), the host OS, the physical machine, a virtualized network, and often a distributed storage layer with its own servers, monitoring, and management. Any of those can have an outage or need a reboot. In a shared environment, the provider also has to patch and reboot for security – and that can mean more reboots per year than you’d choose on your own. On a dedicated server, you have: the physical machine, the OS, storage (ideally RAID), and your app. Fewer layers, fewer forced reboots, and you decide when to patch.
What if the dedicated server fails?
Sure, a dedicated server is one box – if it dies, that machine is down. But enterprise-grade servers from solid vendors can run for many years without hardware failure. We use redundant power, dual network uplinks, and ECC RAM where it makes sense. In practice, a well-built dedicated server can run a decade or more. On the other hand, in a VPS environment your virtual server also lives on one physical host at a time; if that host fails, we can migrate your VPS to another hypervisor, often within minutes. So you’re not choosing between “single point of failure” and “no single point of failure” – you’re choosing between different kinds of failure modes and different levels of control.
A hybrid approach
A lot of teams use both. Put your most critical, uptime-sensitive workloads on dedicated server hosting – or a private cloud of dedicated machines – and use VPS hosting for everything else: dev, staging, less critical apps, bursty traffic. You get the simplicity and control of bare metal where it matters and the flexibility of virtual servers where it doesn’t.
We offer both. If you want to lean on dedicated servers for your core infrastructure, check our dedicated server options. If VPS hosting fits better for a given project, see our VPS hosting plans. And if you’re not sure which mix is right, contact us – we can walk through your setup and suggest a split that makes sense.