Starter
Dev boxes & small projects
£4.99
per month
1 vCPU
Dedicated 2 GB
DDR4 40 GB
NVMe - 1 IPv4 + /48 IPv6
- 10 Gbit port · fair use
- DDoS mitigation included
- Linux only on this size
Windows RDP · Bring your own licence Windows Server,
Windows Server,
on hardware that behaves like metal.
Every plan from Professional upward will run Windows Server on Intel Xeon cores nothing else can touch. We don't resell Microsoft licences — you bring your own, mount your own ISO over the console and install it yourself, exactly the way you would on a machine you owned.
- Licence
- Yours
- Access
- VNC + RDP
- Smallest size
- 4 GB RAM
- Editions
- 2022 / 2019
Bring your own licence You supply the key. We supply the machine.
Dedicated vCPU Windows hates steal time. It never sees any.
Your ISO, mounted Install it from the console, like on metal.
VNC console A second door for when RDP locks you out.
DDoS filtering Port 3389 is scanned constantly. We filter first.
Plans
Windows starts at the second size up.
Every plan from Professional upward runs Windows Server — you bring the licence and the ISO, we mount it and get out of the way. The smallest 2 GB size stays Linux only, on purpose — Windows wants more memory than that before it will behave.
Professional
Personal sites & services
£9.99
per month
2 vCPU
Dedicated 4 GB
DDR4 50 GB
NVMe - 1 IPv4 + /48 IPv6
- 10 Gbit port · fair use
- DDoS mitigation included
- Linux or Windows
Business
Production web apps
£15.49
per month
4 vCPU
Dedicated 8 GB
DDR4 80 GB
NVMe - 1 IPv4 + /48 IPv6
- 10 Gbit port · fair use
- DDoS mitigation included
- Linux or Windows
Premium
Busy apps & databases
£24.99
per month
8 vCPU
Dedicated 16 GB
DDR4 160 GB
NVMe - 1 IPv4 + /48 IPv6
- 10 Gbit port · fair use
- DDoS mitigation included
- Linux or Windows
Elite
Compute-heavy workloads
£39.99
per month
16 vCPU
Dedicated 32 GB
DDR4 250 GB
NVMe - 1 IPv4 + /48 IPv6
- 10 Gbit port · fair use
- DDoS mitigation included
- Linux or Windows
Ultimate
Demanding production
£64.99
per month
24 vCPU
Dedicated 64 GB
DDR4 500 GB
NVMe - 1 IPv4 + /48 IPv6
- 10 Gbit port · fair use
- DDoS mitigation included
- Linux or Windows
- Bring your own Windows licence
- No setup fee
- No minimum term
- Administrator access on every plan
- KVM-over-VNC console and ISO mounting
Licensing
You bring the licence. We bring the machine.
We don't resell Windows Server. There's no licence line on your invoice and no key waiting in your dashboard — the plan buys you the hardware, the network and the console, and Windows is something you supply. Mount your ISO, install it over KVM-over-VNC, activate it with your own key. Same as you would on metal.
Here's the part most hosts leave out. Microsoft's terms around moving your own Windows Server licence onto shared, multi-tenant hardware are genuinely restrictive, and a licence that's perfectly valid on the server under your desk may not be valid here. That's not a formality to tick off — check with whoever handles your Microsoft agreement that it covers hosted, multi-tenant use before you order. We can't read your entitlement for you and we won't pretend it'll probably be fine. What we can do is tell you exactly how our platform works so you can put the right question to the right person, so ask us and we'll talk it through.
- The machine
- Intel Xeon cores, DDR4 and NVMe, never oversold
- KVM-over-VNC console
- Watch the installer run, from first boot
- ISO mounting
- Attach your Windows media from the panel
- DDoS filtering
- On from the first minute, every plan
- Windows Server licence
- Yours to buy, hold and keep valid
- CALs, RDS and SQL Server
- Yours as well — we license none of it
Sizing
Windows is hungrier than Linux. Buy accordingly.
This is the single most common mistake we see. Someone prices an RDP server against the Linux box they used to run, picks the same size, and then wonders why the machine feels like treacle. A Linux server idles at a few hundred megabytes. Windows Server with the desktop shell holds about three gigabytes before your software has started.
| What you're running | Memory it wants | Plan we'd pick | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Windows Server, Core install, idle | 2 GB used | Professional (4 GB) | Core has no desktop shell. It is the leanest way to run Windows, and the one nobody picks. |
| Desktop Experience, one admin on RDP | 3–4 GB used | Business (8 GB) | The GUI, Defender and the update stack alone will hold about 3 GB before you install anything. |
| IIS + ASP.NET app, modest traffic | 6–8 GB | Business (8 GB) | Each application pool is its own worker process. Two or three pools eat memory faster than people expect. |
| SQL Server Express alongside the app | 10–12 GB | Premium (16 GB) | Express caps its own buffer pool at 1410 MB, but the OS still needs room to breathe around it. |
| Two or three people on RDP at once | 12–16 GB | Premium (16 GB) | Budget 1.5–2 GB per interactive session once browsers and Office are open. Browsers are the expensive part. |
| Trading terminals, several charts each | 16–20 GB | Elite (32 GB) | MT4/MT5 instances are small individually and brutal in aggregate. Count them honestly before you buy. |
Two rules of thumb worth more than any calculator. First, subtract 4 GB from the plan and treat what's left as your real working memory. Second, if you're torn between two sizes, take the bigger one for a fortnight, watch the actual numbers in Task Manager, and resize down from evidence. Our guide to sizing VPS memory walks through the same arithmetic for Linux, where the answers come out very differently.
Editions
Which Windows you can install.
Whatever your own media and your own licence cover. The console will happily boot any of these, and starting again with a different one later means wiping the disk and mounting a different ISO — so nothing you choose today is permanent.
Windows Server 2022
Standard or Datacenter, Desktop Experience or Core
The version most people bring. Mainstream support runs well past the point where you will have rebuilt this server anyway, and the drivers it needs are already in the box.
Windows Server 2019
Standard or Datacenter, Desktop Experience or Core
Still around because plenty of line-of-business software was certified against it and never re-certified. If your vendor says 2019, bring 2019.
Whatever your ISO is
Mount it from the panel, install from the console
An evaluation build you want to test with, a specific patch level your vendor insists on, or the media that came with your own agreement. Mount it and install it over the VNC console like you would on metal.
Core versus Desktop Experience is worth thirty seconds of thought. Core has no graphical shell, which saves you roughly a gigabyte of memory and a good deal of patch surface — brilliant if you're running IIS or a service and managing it remotely. If you're going to sit on the desktop and click things, take Desktop Experience and pay the memory.
RDP and hardening
Port 3389 is the most attacked door on the internet.
Not an exaggeration and not a scare tactic — an internet-facing Windows box starts collecting login attempts within minutes of getting an address. None of this is exotic. It's just what nobody writes down until after the bad week.
Filter 3389 at the firewall
Not by moving the port — that buys you an afternoon. Restrict Remote Desktop in Windows Firewall to the addresses you actually connect from, and leave everything else refused.
Rename and re-secure Administrator
Every credential-stuffing bot on the internet tries Administrator first. Rename it, give it a passphrase no one has ever typed twice, and make a second named account for daily work.
Leave NLA switched on
Network Level Authentication makes the box demand credentials before it spends resources drawing you a login screen. It is on by default. People turn it off to fix a connection problem and forget.
Let Windows Update run
Pick a maintenance window and let it patch. A snapshot before patch Tuesday costs nothing and turns a bad update into a five-minute rollback.
Know where the console is
When a firewall rule locks you out of RDP, KVM-over-VNC in the dashboard is how you get back in. Find it before you need it, not during.
Let us take the noise
Exposed RDP attracts volumetric junk as well as brute force. Our edge filtering is on from the first minute, included, on every plan.
The filtering in front of all of this is the same always-on DDoS mitigation that covers our bare metal, included on every plan rather than sold as a tier. If you want the longer version of the setup story, the Windows RDP guide on our blog goes step by step, and the docs cover first connection and the console.
Before you ask
Windows RDP questions.
Is the Windows licence included in the price?
No. We do not resell Windows Server, so there is no licence line on your invoice and no key from us. You bring your own licence, mount your own ISO over the KVM-over-VNC console and install it yourself. Anything else Microsoft licences separately — CALs, Remote Desktop Services, SQL Server — is yours to bring too. Before you order, check that your own agreement actually covers running Windows Server on hosted, multi-tenant hardware, because Microsoft is strict about that and it is not a formality. If you are unsure how your agreement reads, get in touch before you order and we will tell you exactly what we can and cannot do at our end.
Why is the smallest plan Linux only?
Because Windows Server needs more than 2 GB of memory to behave, and an RDP server that spends its life swapping is a bad product. Desktop Experience holds roughly 3 GB before you install a single thing. So Windows starts at the Professional size and we would rather tell you that than sell you a machine you will be unhappy with.
How do I connect the first time?
The first connection is over the KVM-over-VNC console in the dashboard, not RDP — the machine arrives as bare virtual hardware, you mount your Windows ISO and run the installer on the screen. Once Windows is up, you enable Remote Desktop and connect on the IPv4 address we gave you at deploy. From macOS or Linux use the Microsoft Remote Desktop client or any RDP client such as Remmina. Nothing about the machine itself is unusual; it behaves exactly like metal.
What if I lock myself out of RDP?
Open the KVM-over-VNC console in the dashboard and fix it, the same way you would with a crash cart. A bad firewall rule is not a support ticket here. Rescue boot and a one-click reinstall are in the same panel if the damage goes deeper.
Can I upgrade an RDP server later?
Yes. Resize onto a larger plan from the dashboard — it is the same disk and the same install, so your Windows comes with it, though a core-count change can make Windows want reactivating and that part sits with you and your key. Windows is more sensitive to a memory ceiling than Linux is, so if you are unsure between two sizes, take the larger one and resize down after a fortnight of real numbers.
Does Windows run as fast as Linux on the same plan?
On our hardware it is the same Xeon silicon either way, on a node we do not oversell, so raw compute is comparable. The difference is overhead — Windows spends more memory and more background I/O on being Windows. Size for that and the machine feels quick. Undersize it and no amount of CPU will save you.
Ready when you are
The machine's ready. Bring your Windows.
Pick a size from Professional up and it's yours in a couple of minutes — then mount your ISO, install Windows over the console and turn on RDP. Check your licence covers hosted, multi-tenant hardware first. No setup fee, no minimum term.
DDoS filtering and the KVM-over-VNC console are in the plan price. The Windows licence is yours to bring.