All our hosting strives towards the same facilities - full root access to run any hosting technology that you need; whether it's PHP, Rails, Java or anything else, if it runs on Linux, you can run it with us.

Memory (or RAM) is a big deal

The most important factor governing a web or mail server's ability to perform under load is usually the amount of memory it contains. The point at which your server will hit its memory limit depends on:

• how many different applications you are running at once and how often they are called on (e.g. emails received, web requests processed)
• If your server isn't receiving many visitors, email, chat sessions, or whatever else it has been set up to do, it can run more simultaneous tasks.

If you have a high-traffic site, you may find that its demands will stop you from running anything else without compromising performance.

Start small, upgrade without fuss

A 256MB server will easily handle tens of low-traffic web sites, or one or two higher-traffic ones, a database, and a few thousand email messages per day. Whatever package you pick, if your server does start to slow, you can upgrade to a higher package, virtual or dedicated. You won't have to reconfigure it unless you want to, and will only pay the difference in price.

Why might I start with a dedicated server?

While our virtual machines can do everything that dedicated servers do, dedicated servers have some inherent advantages:

• Performance is guaranteed by the hardware, during testing you'll get the peak performance you need;
• Sensitive data is physically isolated on your own drives, giving a simple reassurance to third parties who require that (e.g. PCI DSS and other auditing requirements);
• More storage - Dedicated servers can have 1000GB (1TB) drives fitted compared to the 80Gb limit on our virtual machines.