For high level of security, Dedicated servers are a better option. They not only provide security but better customer experience as well.

Sorry, on this I respectfully disagree. Customer experience has more to do with customer support rather than infrastructure differences between the two. Security on VPS and dedicated can both be terrible ... or exceptionally locked down.

The choice depends on your requirement. If you need fully secure servers and need to invest in dedicated servers else you can go with others.

I would start with a VPS, then work the way up to a dedicated server.

Agreed completely Steve, although both are very important

Yea, I would have to agree...customer experience is almost entirely based off of your dedication towards them!

With regard to the initial post - I think it may be best to go with a VPS, unless you know for sure that you will be experiencing growth. If you go with a knowledgeable and responsive host, it shouldn't be a problem for them to transfer you over to a dedicated server.

I would say this should be a must for the OP

When your business needs more security you must go for that.

For what? For VPS or dedicated?

A dedicated server with remote reboots and KVM is the best choice. You never know what you are going to get with a Shared VPS setup.

Dedicated and VPS is not much different if the provider do not oversold it.

use multiple vps hosts until you need more resources than go dedicated but be careful putting all your eggs for data in one basket.

As has been said, you really don't need to move up to a dedicated server until you've grown to the point where a VPS is no longer the feasible solution.

Hi guys, I added this response to another post but its just as relevant here.

We use a VPS (and dedicated) and sometimes our sites/applications slow down. Remember if your host has one big 16GB dual CPU Server with say 4 disks in a RAID conf with a 10MB pipe BUT has 16 VPS environments all possibly running multiple sites in those environments then there is a lot of disk activity. Those disks can only read and write certain amounts of data no matter what. So if your host oversells and all the sites on all the nodes go wild then you will see a performance hit.

We are suffering slow speed on our sites from heavy bandwidth and disk activity from other VPS users. One of our VPS is idle much of the time and runs pretty fast, but sometimes we suffer slow speeds in those idles times because of the hardware activity. VPS environments are great, but they cannot allocate you dedicated resources on the NIC and disks (OpenVZ for certain) so you will suffer performance issues if others on the node are hogging!

In my opinion and testing, dedicated servers are much better and perform better consequently in line with our apps. VPS are cheap, quick and easy to setup.

With a dedicated server it means just that its all yours. Although VPS you get all your own software and environment and you share hardware. Anything that you share means slower.

As for security, there is an added layer of access for the host to get into any part of the VPS file system. It adds a security risk in my eyes, because you really do not know who has access to the nodes. That is my only concern with VPS along with the disk issues.

If you looking for hosting numerous domains, resell hosting to others, high traffic site, ecommerce site and concern about stability and security and needs more controls then its time to upgrade to dedicated hosting.