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Every week our support team gets the same question, phrased a hundred different ways: "Do I need a VPS or a VDS?" The honest answer is that it depends on how your application uses the CPU, not on how big it is. This guide walks through the difference and gives you a quick way to decide.
The short version
- A VPS shares its CPU cores with other customers on the same host. You get a fair share, with bursts when the host is quiet.
- A VDS reserves physical cores for you. Nobody else is scheduled on them, so your performance is the same at 3 a.m. and at peak hour.
- Both run on the same hardware: AMD EPYC or Intel Xeon CPUs, ECC memory and enterprise NVMe storage, with a 10 Gb/s port on every plan.
If your workload is spiky and forgiving, a VPS is the better deal. If it is steady and latency sensitive, a VDS pays for itself.
How CPU sharing works
On a VPS, each virtual core is a time slice of a physical one. The hypervisor balances those slices across all the guests on the host. Most of the time you will not notice: web servers, small databases and bots spend the majority of their life waiting on the network.
Where sharing shows up is CPU steal: the percentage of time your VM wanted to run but had to wait for its turn. You can see it in top as the st column.
# Watch CPU steal for 10 seconds
vmstat 1 10
A steal value that stays under 2-3% is normal. If it sits above 10% while your app is slow, your workload has outgrown shared cores.
When a VDS is the right call
Pick dedicated cores when at least one of these is true:
- You run a game server. Tick rate is unforgiving: a few milliseconds of scheduling delay become visible lag for every player.
- You process jobs in real time. Video transcoding, CI runners and trading bots all suffer from jitter more than from raw speed.
- You need predictable benchmarks. If you are capacity planning, numbers that change hour by hour are worse than useless.
Standard or Plus?
Both families come in two flavours. The Plus plans move to newer CPU generations with higher clock speeds and faster NVMe. They are worth it for single-threaded workloads, like most game servers and PHP applications, where clock speed matters more than core count.
| Workload | Our suggestion |
|---|---|
| Personal site, blog, small API | VPS Standard |
| WooCommerce or busy CMS | VPS Plus |
| Minecraft, FiveM, Rust | VDS Plus |
| CI runners, encoding, databases | VDS Standard or Plus |
Moving between plans
You are never locked in. Upgrades from VPS to VDS keep your IP addresses and your data, and our team handles the migration with a short planned reboot. If you are unsure, start smaller: scaling up is a ticket away.
Rule of thumb: buy for the workload you have today, with room for one busy month. Not for the one you might have in two years.
Still undecided?
Open a ticket with a short description of what you run and how many users you expect. A human from our team will answer, usually within minutes, with a concrete plan recommendation and no upsell.
