For instance, may web hosts offer Virtuozzo VPS's range from £30-40 per month price. This does not compare well with some of the dedicated server deals which seem to get cheaper everyday. Prices start for a "real" server at around £29 per month. So why rent a virtual private server when you can have a real server for much less?

Quite simply people are not comparing "like with like." It's assumed that the next best "step up" from a shared hosting account is a dedicated server. I don't always agree with this and it can be a costly mistake, simply choosing the cheapest dedicated server deal.

A professional hosting company would not stay in business very long if it hosted all it's shared hosting accounts on cheap £29 per month dedicated servers. Hosting servers can require a significant capital investment on the part of the host. To cope with the load its very likely that even the most basic specification hosting server will have dual processors, possibly up to 4-8 GB of RAM. A hosting server is unlikely to rely on a single IDE hard drive. In the world of web hosting, RAID is the order of the day. RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Discs."

There are various types of RAID configuration but the minimum RAID setup requires two hard drives and is called RAID1 or "mirroring." With RAID1, if one disc fails there is still an image on the remaining drive containing all the files and operating system. Quite often if a disc fails on server with RAID, the server can carry on hosting hundreds, maybe thousands of websites, email until a server technician calls into the data centre with a replacement hard drive. Quite often this task can be done without rebooting the server, due to "hot swappable" hard drive bays which more expensive web hosting servers are equipped with.

Another common drive or RAID configurations is RAID5. A miniumum of three discs are required for RAID5. Not only does RAID5 offer redundancy but also increased performance (faster disc reads and writes). The type of hard drive used in hosting is likely to be different to the more common IDE drive found in the home PC.

Fast and expensive SCSI drives with speeds of 10,000 RPM or more are required to cope, though cheaper SATA drives are becoming increasingly popular in hosting business. It's more usually for the RAID to be handled in hardware using a RAID controller, but both Linux and Windows operating systems both support what is known as "software RAID."

It's unlikely any of these benefits (RAID, SCSI, hot swap, dual processors, dual power supplies) are going to be found in a £29 a month dedicated server. Quite often cheap dedicated servers are little more than rack optimized desktop computers. Many people ignore the possibility of catastrophic disc failure. Although hard drive manufacturers quote optimistic "MTF" (mean time before failure) statistics, my experience in the data centre is that hard drive failure happens depressingly often.

So if you feel the time has come when a dedicated server is justifiable you want to really need to consider a dedicated server which has all the benefits that a more expensive piece of hardware suited to shared or VPS hosting offers. A dedicated server with RAID, and dual processors is going to cost in excess of £150 per month.

If this is outside your budget, this is where the VPS comes into its own. VPS hosting is similar to the mainframe idea in the 1960's. In those days computers were simply too expensive for most businesses to buy, so they rented time on a mainframe.

Before you decide on a cheap dedicated server look at the specification offered. A VPS gives you a share on a better class of "mainframe" hardware and may offer a more robust solution.

Paul Lee has over six years experience in the web hosting industry and was formerly Senior System Administrator with Simply.Com Limited. He currently lives and works in London and runs his own consultancy and hosting company Weycrest