The upsell script says dedicated hardware is 'more powerful'. Sometimes it is not — a VPS 16 on current EPYC silicon will outrun an older dedicated box on most workloads, for a third of the price. Here is how we actually advise people.
Choose a VPS when
- Your load varies. Resizing a VPS takes 40 seconds; changing dedicated hardware takes a maintenance window.
- You want snapshots. Whole-machine snapshots before a risky deploy are a VPS feature and it is a big one.
- You need more than one machine. Three VPS instances behind a load balancer beat one large server for availability, at similar cost.
- You are under about 40,000 sustained requests per minute and your working set fits in RAM.
Choose bare metal when
- You need consistent single-thread performance under sustained load — heavy compilation, video transcode, some game servers.
- Your working set exceeds what a VPS can hold and you are I/O bound on real NVMe rather than on a virtualised path.
- You have a compliance requirement for single-tenant hardware, in writing, from someone who can be quoted.
- You are running a database above roughly 2 TB where you want direct control of the storage layer.
The four thresholds
| Signal | Stay on VPS | Consider metal |
|---|---|---|
| Sustained CPU across all cores | under 60% | over 75% for hours |
| Working set vs RAM | fits with headroom | exceeds by 2× or more |
| Disk IOPS, sustained | under 40k | over 80k |
| Change frequency | weekly or more | quarterly |
Send us your current metrics — CPU, memory, IOPS, request rate — and we will tell you which one we would put you on, including when the answer is the cheaper one.