Hey guys, when getting a VPS, what should we focus on first? Performance or price? Or both? 🤔 For me, stability and security come first, but what do you guys usually prioritize? Apart from basic specs like RAM, CPU, and disk type (SSD/HDD), are support quality and SLA agreements serious criteria too? When choosing between NVMe and SATA SSDs, what factors should we consider?
What should I look out for when choosing a VPS?
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I think when choosing a VPS, you need to seriously consider SLA agreements as well as stability. I've been through this myself—even if you pick a company that promises 99.9% uptime for your customers, you still need to check the state of their network infrastructure. Once, my VPS shared a physical server rack with others, and because of a DDoS attack on one of them, I experienced downtime too. What did I do next? I switched to a SaaS company that uses 10Gbps uplink instead of the standard 1Gbps.
For disks, I definitely recommend NVMe. If you're comparing SATA SSDs, look at the IOPS and latency results. When I ran PostgreSQL on an NVMe disk added as an option to my server, I saw nearly a 5x speed boost in wal write operations. Even on servers without GPU integration, NVMe's IOPS advantage automatically reflects across the entire system. If the price difference matters—say, a 250GB NVMe is 10-15% more expensive—but if I'm advising a customer to invest in a database or file server, I recommend going for NVMe.
RAM and CPU are actually the first things you should look at; if your application supports it, aim for a minimum of 32GB RAM and an 8-core CPU. As for storage, I insist on moving past SATA SSDs to NVMe. In my last three projects, I went with 500GB+ NVMe drives and felt a lot more comfortable. When it comes to price-to-performance, you can find a VPS with 16GB RAM, 4 cores, and 500GB NVMe for around €45—this setup is enough for most mid-sized projects.
Also, don’t overlook support and SLA. The last two VPS providers I used responded to issues in under 10 minutes, whether it was a shoutcast stream or a Ceph setup. Paying an extra €5 to go from €30 to €35 boosted the support quality by almost 10x. My current provider started with 24/7 live chat, then they signed an SLA agreement within 15 minutes, guaranteeing 99.9% uptime.
I almost learned the hard way about RAM and storage too. Last year when I moved to a new VPS, I was only focused on the price and tried to make do with 2GB of RAM. Three months later, when traffic exploded, my application kept getting "OOM killed." Luckily, I had backups so I could restore the system, but after that lesson, I upgraded to 4GB of RAM and switched to NVMe SSD storage. Now it runs smoothly. As for support, once there was a hardware failure at the data center and I got a response from the ticket system in just 1 hour—lucky for me, it was around the time I was going back and forth to the doctor.
A few months ago, I started my story. While looking for a VPS to set up a new site based on a friend's recommendation, I got stuck on the price-performance balance. I started with a regular SSD VPS, but when traffic was higher than usual, the server kept giving "503 Service Unavailable" errors. At first, I thought RAM and CPU were sufficient, but it turned out to be due to slow disk read speeds. Switching from SATA SSD to NVMe completely changed the situation – the site almost never slowed down anymore.
Then, to test the support, I deliberately sent an error message. I had to wait for the ticket response until the first office hour at 9 AM, even though I submitted it at 3 AM. Since it was a small site, it wasn't an extraordinary situation, but it made me realize how serious companies that promise 24/7 support for stability and security really are. Now, I've switched to a server with an SLA, NVMe disks, and instant support – I'm much more at ease about both performance and security.
I almost always go for NVMe over SATA SSD when making the choice because the difference in speed is noticeable even under load. Similarly, when looking at CPU core/thread counts, I consider the use case—high single-core performance is crucial for a web server, whereas multi-core setups are a lifesaver for databases or rendering tasks. For RAM, I don’t just go by "more is better"; instead, I match it to the requirements of the applications I’m running. For example, if I’m running Docker with a few services, 8GB is the minimum, but for full-stack development, I’ll go up to 16GB to ensure stability.
I’ve had a bitter experience with support quality and SLA agreements: once, during a critical outage, the server crashed, and despite a 24-hour SLA, I didn’t get a response for three hours. Now, I only consider providers that offer 24/7 support with a 15-minute response time in their SLA. When balancing cost and performance, I also factor in location and local needs—like how a VPS hosted in Europe offers lower latency compared to one in the U.S.