All my company's servers are dedicated rental, we have a deal with a provider that effectively gives us colo costs without paying the upfront server costs.
But for my personal use, there a few reasons I like VPS options:
- Flexibility: rarely does a month go by where I don't shut down at least one server and add at least one server, plus various resizes
- Locations: my five current VPS servers are split over three data centres in two continents, without any of the hassle of making three seperate arrangements for colocation
- Price: High-end VPSs offer worse value for money than the cheaper options, and for server testing/developement it's handy to be able to pay ~$20/month for a low-end option
- Control Panels: It's surprisingly nice to be able to re-install the OS in a couple of minutes with a single click, to have a simple web GUI to control backups (and for that matter, the option to automatically backup the entire server regularly), it's not something I'd need for most servers, but for testing stuff out where I'm regularly re-installing it is very nice (I've got my server deployment down to a 600line bash script, so any time I want to try something new I re-install the OS, run my script, and in 5 minutes I've got my ideal server ready to go)
Control panel keeps coming up. I haven't used one, so maybe that's what I'm missing. You're right, single click OS install or backup would be compelling.
Being able to dump, restore, rebuild, reimage, or do pretty much anything to the server without fear of leaving it in some unrecoverable state is an advantage that cannot be ignored. It's great that you can simply trash and reinstall a server without having to be careful you won't inadvertently lock yourself out and need to request a technician for a reboot or a manual rebuild.
If you have a co-lo provider that gives you access to toggle power plus serial console access, you have it nearly as good, but you still can't re-image the machine without having it installed as such from the start.
The best hybrid approach would be to get a decent machine at a co-lo provider, then partition it yourself using Xen.
But for my personal use, there a few reasons I like VPS options:
- Flexibility: rarely does a month go by where I don't shut down at least one server and add at least one server, plus various resizes
- Locations: my five current VPS servers are split over three data centres in two continents, without any of the hassle of making three seperate arrangements for colocation
- Price: High-end VPSs offer worse value for money than the cheaper options, and for server testing/developement it's handy to be able to pay ~$20/month for a low-end option
- Control Panels: It's surprisingly nice to be able to re-install the OS in a couple of minutes with a single click, to have a simple web GUI to control backups (and for that matter, the option to automatically backup the entire server regularly), it's not something I'd need for most servers, but for testing stuff out where I'm regularly re-installing it is very nice (I've got my server deployment down to a 600line bash script, so any time I want to try something new I re-install the OS, run my script, and in 5 minutes I've got my ideal server ready to go)