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Choosing & sizing

How many vCPUs does a VPS need?

Short answer

Most workloads need fewer cores than people buy. One shared core saturates a gigabit VPN link. Two dedicated cores run a busy website. Four run a game server or a Docker stack. Beyond eight, you are usually buying parallelism for builds, crawling or transcoding. Whether cores are dedicated matters more than how many there are.

The specification that actually determines responsiveness is dedicated versus shared. A shared vCPU is scheduled against other tenants, so under contention your process waits — visible as steal time. Two dedicated cores routinely outperform four shared ones for anything latency-sensitive.

Single-thread clock speed matters for a specific set of workloads: game server tick loops, trading strategies, most PHP request handling and single-threaded compilation. For those, a high-frequency dual-core beats a slow eight-core.

See also: vCPU

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