I'm curious, when choosing a VPS, what factors do you focus on besides technical details like CPU, RAM, storage types (SSD vs HDD), or bandwidth? How do you balance price-performance? I experience sudden traffic spikes in my projects—what criteria should take priority in such cases? What do you look for?
What should I look out for when buying a VPS?
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Before switching to a VPS, I was on shared hosting for a few months, but sudden traffic spikes kept giving me "CPU limit exceeded" errors. Eventually, I upgraded to a VPS, but at first, my site still crashed with just 1 vCPU and 1GB RAM—WordPress and MySQL together would max out the system. One lesson I learned the hard way was storage: I initially got an HDD server, but had to switch to SSD because MySQL queries and file access were so slow on HDD that page load times hit 8 seconds.
For handling traffic spikes, three things are critical for me:
1. A provider with automatic scale-up support (thanks to bkCloud’s auto-scale, I could add extra resources in 20 minutes when traffic spiked).
2. SSD options (after switching from HDD to SSD, performance improved by 300%).
3. Snapshot/backup system (when I messed up a server config, I was back up in 5 minutes).
In the past, I’d just look at CPU/RAM and settle for 2 vCPU/4GB RAM—but now, especially for projects with traffic spikes, I also focus on RAM cache and storage type.