[wineisfine]

It's not quite "hip", but a dedicated server on OVH is pretty sweet. Their WHM/cpanel licences are cheap about 25/month. And you can then run MANY websites/projects all under the same umbrella, instead of each time starting over again with a barebone Digital Ocean droplet/Linode, etc. Plus, you got full power.

Unless you're running some SaaS project, that really needs to be able to scale rapidly -- this is to me still a very solid, simple, worry-free solution.

Btw: with OVH, it comes with 500gb FTP backup, you can add backups to a secondary HD, and you can add other offsite backups, as Amazon S3. Plus, they have a great IP policy, for just a one-time $2, you can get additional IP's, without recurring costs, up to 256 per server: and localised. So you can have 10 USA IP's and 20 Norwegian IP's and 10 Czech IP's all on the same server.

[pier25]

You could do the same thing with a single dedicated virtual machine.

The problem with classic dedicated servers is hardware... when a disk (or other component) fails it can be a little nightmare.

[gesman]

Second exactly that.