There are certain specific cases where a VPS is a better fit than our service:
- If the public face of your application is not web-based, it won't work on our service.
- We provide a very full, carefully-engineered environment that is suitable for a wide variety of applications and customizable for lots more. But if you need the ability to manipulate the environment at a very low level, such as loading custom kernel modules or filesystems, you won't be able to do that here.
- If you want to learn about a career in the fast-paced, exciting world of Internet system and security administration, our service isn't a good place for that.
Likewise, there are several cases where we are a much better choice than a VPS, but they all boil down to this: you have stuff to do, and spending lots of time installing, customizing, tuning, and maintaining a VPS isn't it.
Whether that's running a production application, developing your big idea, or just learning how to program, there's a good chance you're a lot better off here than you are at a lot of other places. We call ourselves a "do-it-yourself" provider, true, but we try pretty hard to provide you a great environment and a set of high-quality tools to do your "it."
(And before you make a decision between our service and a VPS based on price, please question your assumptions.)