If you’ve been shopping for a cheap dedicated server – something under $100 a month – you’ve probably seen a lot of old hardware. There’s a reason: at that price, dedicated server hosting usually means older CPUs, less RAM, and single disks. These days, VPS hosting on modern infrastructure often gives you better performance for the same money. Here’s when it makes sense to go virtual instead of bare metal.
What you get with a budget dedicated server
Many dedicated server providers offer boxes under $60 or $100 a month. At that range you’re often looking at older parts: Core2Duo, Atom, or similar. Limited RAM, a single disk, and no redundancy. They’re “dedicated” in that the machine is yours, but the performance per dollar is low compared with today’s virtualized options.
What you get with VPS hosting on solid infrastructure
Our VPS hosting runs on hypervisors with dual Xeon E5 processors, SSD storage in RAID, and plenty of RAM. You don’t get the whole physical server – you get a slice – but that slice is often faster and more reliable than a $60 dedicated server with a decade-old CPU. We don’t oversubscribe: your virtual server has dedicated CPU and RAM. So for the same budget, you can get a VPS with multiple cores and SSD that outperforms a cheap dedicated server.
When a dedicated server still makes sense
Dedicated server hosting is still the right choice when you need the whole machine: lots of disk, custom hardware, or a workload that doesn’t fit virtualization (e.g. big storage clusters, specific PCIe cards). We have customers running dozens of dedicated servers for that kind of work. But for general-purpose apps, databases, and web hosting, a well-run VPS hosting plan on modern hardware often beats a cheap dedicated server.
If you’ve been looking for a low-cost dedicated server, compare with our VPS hosting and see what you get for the price. If you truly need bare metal, we offer dedicated server hosting too – just with the understanding that the sweet spot for “cheap” dedicated has largely moved to virtual.