Choosing & sizing
What is the best VPS setup for a beginner?
Short answer
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.
The single most useful habit for a beginner is snapshotting before change. Snapshots here are instant and the first three are free, so there is no reason not to.
Second most useful: do the security basics on day one. Key-based SSH, no password authentication, no root login, and a firewall that denies everything except what you need. Those four steps eliminate the overwhelming majority of real-world compromises.
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…