If you are planning on providing remote Microsoft services, such as Silverlight video hosting, Exchange e-mail or Sharepoint services for your company, a Windows virtual private server is the choice to make. Not only does Microsoft provide the best integration with its own applications, it also can be managed securely via your company network. The primary difference between virtual private servers and dedicated servers involves storage space, CPU power, bandwidth, and security.
Windows server hosting also allows for applications that can vastly extend your website. If you would like a virtual call center that is Skype-based, stays online 24 hours, and routes calls to anyone within your organization, it is possible with a Windows VPS and a virtual sound card. For those that might have a use for a virtual PBX, your costs would be much lower immediately than if you continued to use a hardware-based solution tied to your phone company as a provider.
Certainly. Windows can host PHP, PERL, and almost any other language used in website development. If there are a lot of technical underpinnings tied to development that is more often served on Linux, one can always use the Windows environment to run an Apache webserver; a practice that often provides more native functionality for non-Windows application development. For many that prefer to have the best of both worlds with regard to functionality, Windows server hosting offers greater flexibility.
Yes, if you have selected a hosting provider with the latest Microsoft Windows Server offering available. The 2008 R2 with SP1 version includes an updated Hyper-V capability that allows for multiple virtual machine instances to be run and configured. You can therefore make changes to the total amount of memory that each instance is running. This is pretty useful if you want to create more than one environment on the server for applications to run in. A company that ran its reporting functionality in one environment and it's e-mail in another could schedule more resources to be available for daily reporting in the evening after most of the workers had gone home for the night; taking the necessary memory resources from the now quiet messaging server.