We host about 30 websites using typical shared hosting plans using ASP.NET and SQL 2000/2005/2008. I am now wondering about hosting all of these websites using our own virtual private server. This is clearly cheaper but comes with a lot of questions I need answers to: Is the risk of having to keep this VPS server up and running worth it? Until now, the host provider has managed the server and we have not had to worry about crashes, downtime, software patches etc. We are not server administrators, we are programmers, so this is not really our expertise. On the other hand, it may not be hard to learn. When we make a website live, we log in to a domain management control panel and change the primary and secondary name servers to point to our shared web host: Eg ns1.sharedwebhost.com and ns2.sharedwebhost.com These name servers are going to have to change when we have a VPS. I don’t understand anything about how to set this up. Is there some useful info anyone could direct me to? Or is there software we need to install to make the primary and secondary name servers work on our VPS? The control panel we have for shared hosting comes with DNS management like this: http://www.yart.com.au/stackoverflow/dns.png What software would I need to install to create this for each site we host at a VPS? The control panel we have for shared hosting also comes with a POP email interface that allows email addresses to be added easily by our customers. Is this something that can be easily set up at a VPS so clients can manage their own email addresses? Is there software we need to install to make this work?