Hi all,

I might be interested in getting a VPS hosting plan for some small personal sites and .NET projects. Was thinking of Softsys Bronze Plan, as my current shared host plan is with them too. The stuff I want to host has grown beyond the capabilities of a Shared hosting plan, and I also want more control over the IIS/ASP.NET configuration, that's why I'm considering VPS.

The main config details would be:

• Hyper-V
• 30 GB of diskspace
• 1 GB of RAM

More info here: http://www.softsyshosting.com/Windows-VPS-HyperV.aspx

Does anyone have experience with this plan (or something similar from another host), and maybe could answer these couple of questions:

• Bronze has a total diskspace of 30GB. Is the OS part of this quota or not ? If so, how much does a base configuration with Windows 2008 take up in diskspace ?
• Would you advise Windows 2008 R2 or Normal. Or would you advise to use Windows 2003 with this config.
• I'm planning on running a SQL Server Express install too. Would 1 GB of RAM be enough for both the Windows 2008 (R2) and SQL Express. The database load will not be that very high (a couple of 1000 records returned each day). The DB will most likely be far away from the 4GB limit, that's why I'd go for a SQL Express instead of paying extra licensing costs for a SQL Web install. But I'm more concerned about performance.
• Would you recommend Softsys as a VPS host ? I've been with them for one year for my Shared hosting plan, and have no complaints so far.

Also, as I have no VPS experience, what are the pitfalls I need to be aware of, in terms of performance mainly, but maybe in other areas too ?

Mathieu