Choosing & sizing
Is a VPS worth it compared to shared hosting?
Short answer
A VPS is worth it as soon as you need something shared hosting will not let you do: a specific runtime version, a background worker, a non-web service, Docker, or freedom from arbitrary process limits. If you only serve a static site and never want to touch a terminal, shared hosting is genuinely fine.
The cost difference at the entry level has largely disappeared — $4 buys a real virtual machine. What has not disappeared is the administration burden: on a VPS, security updates, firewalling and backups are yours.
The honest test is whether anyone on your side will run apt upgrade once a month. If the answer is no, an unmanaged VPS is a liability rather than an upgrade.
7 answers in Choosing & sizing
- What is a VPS? A VPS (virtual private server) is a virtual machine with guaranteed CPU, memory and storage, running its own operating system on shared physical hardw…
- What is a VPS used for? A VPS runs anything that needs to be online continuously: websites and APIs, game servers, VPN and proxy endpoints, mail servers, trading bots, CI run…
- How much does a VPS cost? A usable VPS starts at about $4 a month for 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM and 20 GB of NVMe storage. A production instance with dedicated cores, 8 GB of RAM and…
- What is the cheapest VPS that is actually usable? About $4 a month buys 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM and 20 GB of NVMe on real KVM virtualisation. That is genuinely enough for a WireGuard VPN, a DNS resolver, …
- How much RAM does a VPS need? Match RAM to the workload, not to a price tier. 1 GB runs a VPN, DNS resolver or small bot. 2–4 GB runs a small website with a database. 8 GB is the c…
- How many vCPUs does a VPS need? 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…