onionvps

Choosing & sizing

What is a VPS used for?

Short answer

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.

The most common single use is hosting a website or application that outgrew shared hosting — typically because it needed a background worker, a specific runtime version, or a service that is not a web server at all.

The second-largest category is private infrastructure: a personal VPN, a DNS resolver that your ISP does not operate, a file sync server, a media library. These workloads need very little hardware and a great deal of thought about jurisdiction, which is why a $4 instance in the right country often beats a large instance in the wrong one.

7 answers in Choosing & sizing

Back to all answers