The fully managed VPS services from Layershift are very good. They howerver do run plesk. Still nice to have a VPS in which you know is backed up etc etc.
http://uk.layershift.com/
Thanks for the recommendation - appreciated! I bumped into this thread by accident and I just had to add to your comment regarding Plesk.
I see in this case that the OP is currently using cPanel, but that shouldn't cause any problems since migrating to another panel such as Plesk is pretty painless - and of course we're happy to help where possible.
Beyond that, you're more than welcome to run cPanel on an unmanaged VPS if you prefer - just we prefer the reliability and security of Plesk for our
managed range since it gives us less headaches
Overall I definitely agree with Daniel's post that a VPS is generally a great solution compared to shared hosting; it's really nothing more than a different way of dividing a physical server up between multiple customers, but the benefits of having your own isolated environment (the extent of isolation depends on the virtualisation technology) - often with guaranteed hardware resources - really helps enhance the reliability.
However, just as with shared hosting you have to watch out for overselling, and unfortunately it's really easy for providers to do this without you knowing (until it's too late). In particular, a provider can easily overload their hardware nodes (physical servers) such that you don't get much CPU usage or RAM availability. This would either mean that you need to upgrade to a higher spec. VPS than you would otherwise require, or your VPS simply doesn't work properly. In short, experienced VPS providers should be wise enough to know how to manage VPS platforms properly, and have learnt that ultimately overloading a server will cause more problems long-term than providing a high quality service at a slightly higher price...
It should be obvious that our policy is to spec. our servers such that we have spare RAM for bursting (a feature of the Virtuozzo VPS platform) - something which would obviously be useless to our clients if we had no more, or even less than, the VPS plans hosted on each hardware node require.
Finally (since I seem to be writing a book here!), I'd point out the obvious in that if you're taking an unmanaged VPS it means that you need to manage it... which is pretty much the same responsibility as managing a dedicated server; you have to be comfortable with troubleshooting, security, patching, compiling etc. If you're not this person (or not willing to learn, and perhaps suffer bits of downtime along the way) then you may benefit from a fully managed solution instead - there are a few of these around now.
