said by Guspaz:said by MineCoast:OVH is a decent company. I used them for a short bit. I used ovh.ie. My server was overseas, but was dirt cheap... We are talking $12 a month for a Dedicated Server with Unmetered 100 MBit, 2 GB Ram, 500 GB HDD, and more. For a tiny bit more, you can get servers with 16 GB ram and TB Hard Drive's. I was paying $50ish for a server with 16 GB Ram.
It's a pretty awesome setup... almost like VM's but it's not. You can reinstall your server with any OS anytime you want and if your server goes offline (stops responding to ICMP packets) they, as well as you, will be alerted that your server is offline and they will go check it out and try to reboot it and if it won't reboot it, they will boot it up into an emergency OS. It's a very awesome setup they have.
They also have a free 100 GB FTP backup for you to use if you need to backup some data before you reformat your server.
»www.ovh.ie/dedicated_ser ··· sufi.xml
To be fair, you can do all of that and a lot more with a good VPS. Reinstall your server with any OS, repartition your server, migrate a server between datacenters, access the serial console out of band (dedicated server requires special hardware to do that), etc. A VPS will always, by nature, enable much more flexibility than a dedicated server.
Personally I'd rather have a dedicated server and have my own VM's on it. I've used VM's before with hosting providers have always hated the performance of them and my VM would often go offline for no reason. I bought my own dedicated server... Dual CPU Xeon L5420's Quad Core's with 16 GB Ram and 4x 1 TB Drives (4 TB Total) and colocated it in a data center for $49 a month and have VMWare ESXi 5.1 installed on it with at least 10 different VM's running and if I ever device to switch to a new server or my server dies, I can simply copy the disk image and config files over to a new ESXi server. I wouldn't have it any other way
Plus having my own hardware, if something should happen or I want to upgrade, I can swap parts out. The datacenter I am in doesn't charge me for most "hands-on" tasks and they'll even do free OS reloads, basic troubleshooting, and free KVM access as needed.