Choosing & sizing

A VPS (virtual private server) is a virtual machine with guaranteed CPU, memory and storage, running its own operating system on shared physical hardware. You get full root access and can install anything. It sits between shared hosting, where you control almost nothing, and a dedicated server, where you rent the whole machine.

A VPS runs anything that needs to be online continuously: websites and APIs, game servers, VPN and proxy endpoints, mail servers, trading bots, CI runners, Docker workloads, media and file servers, blockchain nodes, and remote development environments. The common thread is a persistent machine with a public address and root access.

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 160 GB of storage runs around $34 a month. Storage-heavy plans with several terabytes start near $22. Longer billing terms reduce these by 5–22%.

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, a Tor relay, a small bot or a static site. Below that price you are almost certainly buying an oversold container rather than a virtual machine.

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 comfortable floor for a production application or Docker stack. 16 GB and up is for CI, large databases, Magento or heavy crawling.

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.

Most projects use far less than they fear. A typical blog serving 50,000 monthly visits uses about 100 GB. A VPN carrying 1080p video for one person uses roughly 3 GB per hour. Video streaming and seedboxes are the exceptions, where terabytes are normal. Plans here include 2–50 TB, and one is unmetered.

Check five things: virtualisation type (KVM, not OpenVZ), whether cores are dedicated, which jurisdiction the server sits in, what identity data the provider collects, and what happens when someone complains about you. Price is the easiest thing to compare and the least likely to matter after the first month.

Yes. CPU and RAM can be increased with a reboot, usually in under two minutes. Disk can be grown online. Shrinking is not possible in place — a smaller plan requires a rebuild and restore. Moving to a different country is also a rebuild, because the data has to physically move.

Provisioning takes under 60 seconds once payment confirms. The variable is the payment itself: Solana or TRON confirm in under a minute, Litecoin in about ten, Bitcoin in roughly twenty and Monero in about twenty. From clicking order to holding SSH credentials is typically two to twenty-five minutes depending on the coin.

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.

You need managed hosting if nobody on your side will apply security updates, configure a firewall or restore a backup. Managed plans cost two to five times more and remove that work. Unmanaged hosting assumes you are comfortable in a terminal — every OnionVPS plan is unmanaged, which is why it is priced as it is.

Start with 2 vCPU, 4 GB of RAM and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS in the region closest to you. Ubuntu has the largest body of tutorials, which matters more than any specification when you are learning. Take a snapshot before every experiment — it turns a broken server into a two-minute rollback.

OnionVPS does not offer a free trial. Instead there is a seven-day money-back guarantee on a first order: if the service does not suit you, tell us within seven days of provisioning and we refund in full to an address you nominate. The entry plan is $4, which makes the risk small either way.