Windows VPS Hosting

I've been reading a lot on the internets about VPS hosting lately, and although the bulk of it seems to be linux based, there are more and more hosts providing Windows VPS hosting. I was shelling out £9.38 a month each on two shared hosting plans, and had plans for another, so thought a Windows VPS host might be a better option.

After shopping about for prices online, I didn't find any particularly enticing deals; especially none that offered the unlimited bandwidth I had with my, then current, hosting company Fasthosts.

I figured it was worth giving Fasthosts a call to see if they had any future plans to provide VPS hosting. The guy I spoke to dismissed the idea of VPS hosting, saying they had no plans to introduce it as their dedicated servers were cheap enough, and that VPS was a combination of the bad sides of shared hosting and dedicated servers all rolled together - eh? He warned me that not all VPS hosts would provide full admin access so to be careful. I thought that was the nature of a VPS, that you had full admin access to your own virtual box. Never the less, his scare tactics made me do a bit more investigating before jumping from this particular shared hosting ship.

I decided to ask Twitter what their experiences of VPS hosting were, and @jesscoburn came back with a series of tweets answering different questions I posed, but warning me that he was slightly biased since he ran his own hosting company. He promised to send me an email with more details, and I asked him for some prices for hosting.

The email he sent me was a mammoth essay detailing the pros and potential pitfalls of VPS hosting. He's promised to turn it into a blog post, which I'll link to here when he does.

His company - Applied Innovations - offer a basic Windows VPS hosting package for $39.95 (around £26 in my language), which gives me 10GB storage and a whopping 500GB of monthly bandwidth. While this is not the unlimited I intially hoped to find, I can't see myself exhausting it in the short term.

I was up and running within a few hours of signing up, and accessing the server via Remote Desktop feels no different to the way I access our dedicated servers at work. The whole thing is nice and speedy and the sites run fast.

It's afforded me the ability to switch this blog to a separate subdomain (blog. rather than www.) and set it up in IIS as a separate website, enabling me to start using ASP.NET MVC as a base for the blog while keeping the rest of my site in a standard WebForms model. I also now have the facility to setup different websites in IIS for every little project idea I have, all running from a different subdomain of anthonyburns.co.uk or their own domain if needed; all for around £6 more than I was previously paying for two shared hosting plans.

If you're in the market for a VPS hosting solution, then I'd highly recommend Applied Innovations - the customer services was the best I've received in years, from any company, and the service itself is flawless.