How to Choose the Right VPS Plan for Your Business

Choose a VPS plan by sizing memory for your peak, matching vCPU to whether your workload is parallel or serial, and adding roughly 30% headroom for growth and spikes. Everything else — disk, bandwidth, location — follows from what you are actually running. This guide turns that into a plan recommendation you can act on in fifteen minutes.

Start from the workload, not the price

The most expensive mistake in VPS buying is picking the cheapest plan and discovering the ceiling during your first traffic peak. The second most expensive is buying four times what you need because a comparison table made it look prudent. Both come from starting at the price column.

Answer three questions first:

1. What is your peak resident memory? Not average — peak. Memory is the resource that fails hardest when it runs out, because the kernel starts killing processes.
2. Is the hot path parallel or serial? A single-threaded game server tick loop cares about clock speed and gains nothing from a fourth vCPU. A container host or a build agent scales with thread count.
3. How variable is the load? Steady load can be sized tightly. Spiky load needs headroom or the ability to add instances.

The plans, and what each is genuinely for

Plan	RAM	vCPU	SSD	Monthly	Hourly	Fits
Ion	2 GB	1	40 GB	€4	€0.0056	VPN endpoint, small static site, bot, monitoring agent, single low-traffic WordPress
Pulse	4 GB	2	80 GB	€6	€0.0083	WordPress with real traffic, small API, staging environment, a few containers
Core	8 GB	2	120 GB	€10	€0.0139	Application plus its own database, small e-commerce, mid-size game server
Forge	16 GB	4	160 GB	€16	€0.0222	Multi-container stacks, busier databases, development environments for a team
Apex	24 GB	6	200 GB	€30	€0.0417	Production workloads with concurrency, analytics, CI runners
Titan	32 GB	8	300 GB	€58	€0.0806	Largest single-instance workloads before bare metal becomes the better buy

Every plan includes full root access, KVM isolation, DDoS protection, 1 Gbps unmetered traffic and deployment in under sixty seconds across twelve locations.

Sizing memory: the number that matters most

Measure peak resident memory on your current setup with ps aux --sort=-%mem during a busy period, or estimate from the components:

• A tuned Linux base uses roughly 200–400 MB.
• MySQL or PostgreSQL with a modest working set: 1–2 GB before tuning.
• PHP-FPM: multiply your max_children by the average process size, typically 40–80 MB.
• Node or Python application processes: 150–500 MB each, more with large in-memory caches.
• Redis: whatever you set maxmemory to, and set it — an unbounded Redis will grow into the OOM killer.

Add those, then add 30%. If the total is 5 GB, take the 8 GB Core rather than the 4 GB Pulse. Running at 95% memory is not efficient, it is fragile.

Sizing CPU: parallel or serial

vCPU count only helps work that can run in parallel. Web servers, container hosts, build agents and transcoding all scale with cores. Game server tick loops, single-process scripts and many older applications do not — for those, one or two vCPU with a fast clock beats eight slow ones.

A rough rule for web workloads: one vCPU per 2 000–5 000 daily visitors on a cached site, far fewer if every request hits a database. The honest version is that you cannot know without measuring, which is what hourly billing is for.

Disk: size for growth, and remember the OS

Take your current data, double it, and add 10 GB for the operating system, packages and logs. Logs are the classic surprise — an unrotated application log will fill a 40 GB disk faster than your data will. Configure logrotate before you need it.

Databases and container registries are the two workloads that outgrow their disk unexpectedly. If either is in your stack, take the next tier up on storage grounds alone.

Bandwidth and network

All standard plans run on 1 Gbps unmetered ports with no overage billing, so throughput is only a question if you are moving sustained multi-gigabit traffic. Media delivery, CDN origins and large file distribution are the cases where the 10 Gbps streaming range from €9.99 is the correct product rather than a bigger standard plan — you are buying port speed, not compute.

Location: the choice people spend least time on and should spend most

Latency is physics and no plan upgrade fixes it. Serving German users from Frankfurt rather than the US East Coast removes over a hundred milliseconds from every uncached request, and TLS handshakes pay that cost several times over. Choose the site closest to the majority of your users, and if you are unsure, our guide to choosing a datacenter location walks through the trade-offs including data residency.

Four worked examples

Scenario	Plan	Why
WordPress, 30k visits/month, caching on	Pulse (€6)	4 GB covers PHP-FPM plus MySQL comfortably; 2 vCPU handles cached traffic easily
SaaS API with PostgreSQL, 200 req/s peak	Core or Forge (€10–16)	Database buffer pool needs the memory; concurrency needs the cores
Minecraft server, 40 players	Core (€10)	Java heap is the constraint; the tick loop is single-threaded so extra vCPU is wasted
Team development environment, weekdays only	Forge, hourly (~€5.86/mo)	264 hours a month against a €16 cap — see the billing comparison

When no VPS plan is the right answer

If your peak memory exceeds 32 GB in a single address space, if you need more than 8 vCPU of sustained parallel compute, or if you want to run your own hypervisor, you have outgrown the range. That is the point to read VPS versus dedicated servers — our bare metal range starts at €209/month for 16 physical cores and 128 GB of ECC memory.

Frequently asked questions

Can I upgrade later?

Yes. Plans can be changed as requirements move, and billing continues at the new hourly rate. Sizing up is smoother than sizing down, so if you are between two tiers and genuinely unsure, take the smaller one and measure — the upgrade path is easier than the refund conversation.

What if I get the size wrong?

With hourly billing an oversized instance costs you hours rather than a month, which is precisely why measuring on real hardware beats estimating. Deploy the larger plan, run your workload for a week, then move down with data.

Is more vCPU always better?

No. A single-threaded application on eight vCPU runs at the speed of one core. Establish whether your bottleneck is concurrency or clock speed first.

How much disk do logs and backups need?

More than people plan for. Rotate logs, and keep backups off the instance — automating VPS backups covers the routine.

Next step

Model your own numbers on the VPS cost calculator, then deploy the plan and measure for a fortnight. At €0.0056 an hour for the entry instance, testing the assumption is cheaper than defending it.