Dedicated, VPS or cloud?
Three ways to get a server, each with a job it does best. Here is how we would choose, including the cases where you should not pick us.
Where a dedicated server wins
- Sustained load. Something that runs flat out all day costs far less on hardware you rent whole than on metered compute.
- Predictable performance. No neighbours, no steal time, no burst credits. What you measure today is what you get in six months.
- Heavy I/O or lots of memory. Databases, storage and virtualisation hosts are where the difference is biggest.
- Serious bandwidth. With an unmetered port the traffic bill simply disappears, which is where cloud gets expensive fastest.
Where a VPS is the better answer
Small services, staging environments, a jump host, a DNS secondary. Anything where you need a machine but not much of one. Paying for a whole server to run a cron job is not clever.
Where a cloud is the better answer
Genuinely variable load that you spin up and tear down: build runners, batch jobs, a campaign that runs for a week. If your capacity needs change by the hour, hourly billing is worth the premium.
We say this plainly because the opposite is also true: most workloads do not change by the hour, and are paying cloud prices for flexibility they never use.
The honest rule of thumb
Is the machine busy more than a third of the time, every day, for months? Then bare metal is almost always cheaper and faster. Is it idle most of the time, or does it exist for two days? Then it is not.
Not sure which side you fall on? Tell us the workload and we will say so — including when the answer is that you do not need us.
Still stuck? Mail support@novogara.com — an engineer answers, at any hour. Back to the knowledge base