We have been testing several virtual dedicated hosting schemes since mid 2007 and the time has come to start offering them as full blown commercial products to an increasing audience of shared hosting fuggees who are totally unsatisfied with having to deal with permanent constraints.

I have summed up in a separate post why shared hosting does not meet the requirements most Web 2.0 applications demand. This turn I will focus on the actual reasons why you should move to more powerful solutions if your current hosting plan is not up to the challenge.

Yes, cheap shared hosting companies will offer you the Universe and beyond, if that's what it takes to make you sign up. Soon you will discover that the size of the deceit is in many cases a lot bigger than the thousands of monthly bandwidth Gigabytes you have been promised. Worse. You will find yourself trapped in tight limits regarding the usage of hardware resources. No matter how fabulous the power of a single server is, if you have to share it with dozens or even hundreds of accounts then you get only a small portion of that strength. As it starts to roll out and grow, your website will become increasingly slow, at times it will simply stall and you are "awarded" the first notification warning from your hosting provider, threatening you to either "optimize" your script or have your account suspended. How nice is that? Most likely you haven't read the endless terms and conditions, where all exceptions to the general offer are judiciously enclosed, to make sure you won't find them easily.

You are in trouble. No "optimization" strategy will save your fancy social network or rich content site. A couple of aggressive caching techniques can postpone the ban for a while. It's a means to relieve the stress on the database server by reducing queries and fetching most of the content from temporary static cached files. This, however, won't spare Apache much. If your web entrepreneurship continues to grow, it is a matter of time until you are taken off the air once again, with little left to be done. Some upgrades to your script here and there to make it a tiny bit more code-efficient won't be enough to comply with the severe restrictions shared hosting implies.

You badly need something more robust to keep moving on and we finally put together the proper tools and infrastructure to make it feasible. If you are serious about your business, we have set up for you the most suitable hosting plans, running on Xen, the enterprise class award-winning open source virtualization technology that is reshaping the web industry.

Available in four flavours and a few add-ons, our offer is designed to cover all sorts of needs and scenarios, from small and medium sized company websites to large corporate portals and complex social networking engines. We leverage Xen to it's full potential, therefore each solution is flexible and scalable on demand, risk free and quick. Meaning that you can scale your plan up and down according to your needs and get the new configuration running in a matter of minutes. Furthermore, since all our plans are based on dedicated virtual servers, you can use your account to accommodate more domains and resell your own hosting plans from ISPConfig, the point and click web based hosting manager we supply. This allows you to make some extra revenue.