Fully managed VPS - the host handles admin tasks, monitoring and security patching.
The rankings are warming up.
A managed VPS bundles system administration: the provider handles OS updates, security hardening, monitoring, backups and 24/7 support. Ideal for teams without in-house sysadmin skills, agencies hosting client sites, or any business-critical project where the time spent on server management costs more than the managed premium. Typical price: 2-3x an unmanaged VPS.
A VPS shares a physical server's hardware with other VPSs through virtualisation, while a dedicated server is entirely yours. A VPS costs less but offers more limited raw performance.
KVM is the modern reference with full hardware isolation and near-native performance. OpenVZ is lighter but limited to Linux. Xen still powers some legacy platforms.
NVMe delivers 3-5x more IOPS than classic SATA SSDs - critical for databases and I/O-heavy workloads. SSDs remain enough for most standard websites and applications.