Ok, and now it's time for me to set you straight. For someone thats all for saving money, why are you getting screwed so bad? cPanel for VPS is a $5 monthly fee at cost, which most VPS providers will give you it at that cost - so why are you paying $15?
Second - VPS's are great and all for lower scale op's, but once you get over a certain threshold (you know.. like over 500 visitors a day on a mysql site) - most VPS's will buckle unless it's PROPERLY setup, which is almost never now a days.
Make sure you do your benchmarks. Until then, I'll stick with my 8 core opteron form Softlayer.
Oh please, set me straight.
As far as price, I mentioned linode.com, and slicehost.com... who NEITHER offer cpanel period. The 14$ was referring to getting cpanel directly FROM a licensing partner of CPANEL.
cPanel - The Leading Control Panel
VPS Licensing. You'll notice that most of these VPS companies OFFERING cpanel packages, also rip you a new one in price, and specs. Again, look at Slicehost and Linode... Both are reputable companies, with very generous bang for the buck.
Next, if your VPS is buckling at 500 visitors/day, you don't know how to configure your LAMP, or you're on a REALLY shit VPS. Again, referring to the above 2 companies I mentioned, they've done their shit right as far as I can see.
For benchmarks, yes, a dedicated box will win, considering the hardware allotment is not comparable to a dedicated box for most packages out there.
It comes down to needs, most of the "ballers" on this site are running dedicated boxes, and using maybe 1/4th of the actual resources they need, at PEAK. I've got a couple VPS's, and a couple dedicateds, each hosts what it needs to host.
Ok, as I was saying. There are a few other things you need to watch out for with the VPS that, although you still need to watch out for them, aren't as serious with a dedicated server.
Obviously there is CPU and RAM allotment. Some companies won't even give you a guarantee'd CPU allotment, so you're screwed if someone else is trying to take a lot of power. Most will give you a small amount such as 512 MHz guarantee'd, etc.
RAM is about the same way. You have burst RAM and guarantee'd ram. Once again this is up to the other clients on the box as well as how they stacked it. If you're on a great box, you might as well have the damn thing to youself. If not, you're going to be pretty screwed especially if the RAM guarantee is <512 MB. That's all of the common sense stuff, though.
Now for the real kicker. Most people don't think about the disk inode offering per VPS. This is a -big- factor if you have a lot of files and/or do scraping like I do. I would hit the disk inode limit way before I would hit my space limit. Just keep this in mind, because the fucker fills up fast!
The other thing in comparing VPS / Dedicated is how stable the performance is. If you have a dedi and you are the only one on it, if you have a performance slow down its due to your stuff. A VPS is so versatile, that if Customer B cancels and now Customer D (you know, a smaller mirror to imageshack or a web scraper like me) gets throw on your box, your resource usage and allotment can change literally overnight. It's not nerely as concrete.
Anyway these are just my 2 cents. Hope it all makes sense, and if not just ask I'll try to explain it a little more ...
Linode has no i/o limit, and has generous RAM/CPU allotments for the price. But spending 100$+ for something you can easily do on a VPS... is 100$+ you could've spent on a new car.
No need for bigger penises here... I'm sure your 8 core from Softlayer is using at LEAST 1% of it's capabilities, which I guess justifies the cost to you.
And no, not a VPS freak, I just think wasting money on something you don't need is dumb. This guy said he was on shared hosting, and the hosting company messed up, so he wants to move to a dedicated solution? Softlayer is great and all, but they seem to be a mostly unmanaged solution.
