VPS vs Dedicated Server

VPS and Dedicated servers are areas I have not yet researched much.
I think its the next step for Midland Internet,though I am unsure which move to make from a reseller account.
Can anyone advise the pros and cons of each, including difference in costs and ease of use.

It depends on so many things! Heres a few ideas:

- Does your site need a dedicated server or are the specs (which tend to be lower, in terms of RAM available etc) on a VPS ok?
- Since a VPS is virtualized, it can be very easy to access through the [usually supplied] offline control panel. Forgotten your root password?! Easy to recover. Software firewalled your self out? The offline panel may help you.
- A VPS can usually be rebooted/stopped/started by yourself through the control panel and in alot of cases you can "refresh" it, i.e. bringing it back to a "formatted" state... often choosing the operating system template that you would like!
- VPS host machine hardware, since so many systems are hosted on it, is generally very high grade - but this depends on your provider. I.e., you will often find very fast SAS/SCSI drives in a highly dependable array such as RAID 10 with fast dual gigabit connections to the network.
- A dedicated server is entirely yours, you choose the hardware! (out of the choice from your provider of course)
- A VPS can be moved between machines usually, if hardware fails in a VPS host node, your provider should bring it back online ASAP which is often done by restoring the VPS to another host node.
- Depending on VPS technology, you may not be able to compile your own kernel or load modules to it.
- A VPS can usually be found much cheaper than a dedi.
- With a dedicated, you're in control of exactly how the system is run. With a VPS, your provider may overload the host system or not run it correctly... you need to trust them because the security isn't within your very own machine - there are still further doors before the outside world.

So that's my list of random things that comes to mind, sorry it couldn't be more orderly but I'm about to go sleepy time in bed! Alot of those points I think do favour to a VPS because a VPS does have alot of benefits, but you must remember to research your provider ALOT! They run the host machine and they're running your VPS, when renting a dedicated it's all yours, as far as the system operation is concerned!

What would you be using the server for? One good example of using a VPS is experimentation with new operating systems. For example, if your host was running OpenVZ with HyperVM.. you can simply login and reload the VPS with a new operating template which they supply. With OpenVZ this would be some sort of linux distribution such as Ubuntu, Suse, Fedora or CentOS.

Thanks for a comprehensive answer.
The reasons I am loking is for this site.
I am starting to plan ahead and thinking that at some point it would be best to moved from shared hosting.
What do you think?

Seriously... I've been wanting to ask this question for a long time now but didn't want to cause any problems! Though, on going to ask it.. I notice the "currently active users" now displays a more (what I think is) realistic value. "Currently Active Users: 10 (3 members and 7 guests)".

Was there something up with the online users before, it used to show a good few 100 of users active at any one time but due to various different reasons I was very sure this couldn't be the case! Now you mention shared hosting this backs my thoughts But I guess the problem is fixed now with a nicer value there.

If the site is starting to grow then you may well want to upgrade soon, there is nothing wrong with moving into a VPS for the time being - they will generally be cheaper and since forum software such as vBulletin will generally use alot of disk I/O you can possibly make use of the VPS providers high quality disks Then again, if the cash is there and you want to prepare for the future with big plans ahead.. why not jump on board a dedicated?

PS: The smiley : ) doesn't seem to be working, been wanting to mention this for a while