Typical Virtual Dedicated Hosting hardware would involve using a very powerful machine, such that the server when “sliced up” will still offer excellent performance. Typically, you will want to use multiple quad core CPUs with 8GB+ of RAM. However, the key piece of hardware that most people overlook when looking for a VPS or VDS host is that of disks. Hard disks are still the bottleneck in all modern computer systems, and when those disks are busy, the CPU can do little else but wait. You can have all the CPU power in the world but with slow disks, they’ll never be able to do anything useful – especially when it comes to hosting.
We would generally recommend multiple SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) disks in RAID10 configuration. The more disks you have in the RAID10 array, the best the performance overall. Fast disks make for a system that “feels” a lot faster, and will give the edge over systems using much slower SATA disks.
