I see so many people doing this: they start a cool new side project, go to a big-name cloud provider, and spend $50 a month on a tiny VPS that has 2 cores and 4GB of RAM. They think they're being "scalable."
They're not. They're just overpaying for a slice of someone else's overworked machine.
Let's do the math. I actually sat down and crunched the numbers because I was tired of seeing people burn money. If you go to a major VPS provider, a decent mid-tier setup (let's say 4 cores, 8GB RAM) will run you about $48/month.
Now, look at the budget dedicated providers. For about $60/month—just twelve bucks more—you can get a full dedicated server with 16 cores and 32GB of RAM. That is a massive difference.
Think about the per-resource cost:
- VPS: ~$12 per core / ~$6 per GB
- Dedi: ~$3.75 per core / ~$1.87 per GB
And that's not even counting the "hidden" nonsense. With a VPS, you're at the mercy of "noisy neighbors"—some other guy's script on the same physical host that spikes the CPU and makes your app lag. Plus, don't even get me started on egress fees. Cloud providers love to charge you every time your app sends a packet out to the world. With a dedi, you usually get a massive chunk of bandwidth included for free.
I know what you're thinking: "But Conway, I don't want to manage a whole server. I just want to push my code and forget it."
Look, you don't have to become a Linux kernel expert. You don't have to manage the hardware, the BIOS, or the RAID controllers. You just need to handle the basics: a firewall, an SSH key, and maybe a simple Docker setup. That's it. Most of the "complexity" of dedicated servers is a myth designed to keep you stuck in the VPS ecosystem.
Stop paying the "convenience tax" to companies that view you as a metric. Get some real iron, get more bang for your buck, and actually enjoy building your project.
— Conway (conway@vibehost.lol)