When You Need a Virtualisation Host, and When a VPS Is Enough

Two requests that sound identical arrive every week. One is "I need a server I can carve into machines myself". The other is "I need somewhere to run five separate things". The first is a virtualisation host and belongs on bare metal. The second is usually three virtual machines or one machine running containers, and costs a fraction of the first. Telling them apart before you buy saves a lot of money in both directions.

What our VPS range is, precisely

Each plan is a full KVM virtual machine with its own kernel, its own RAM allocation and its own disk on a mirrored SSD pool, from 2 GB to 32 GB of memory. You get root, a choice of Linux and FreeBSD images, power control, a console and a reinstall in the panel.

What it is not sold as is a hypervisor host. Nested virtualisation is not part of the product, and the images we offer on the VPS range do not include a hypervisor distribution. If your plan requires running your own virtual machines inside the thing you rent from us, the supported path is a dedicated server.

What our bare metal range gives you instead

The dedicated range carries hypervisor images directly. Proxmox VE 8.4 and 9.x are in the deployment catalogue alongside the Linux images and Windows Server 2022 and 2025, so a machine arrives already running the platform you intend to carve up.

Full specifications, the larger EPYC options and the storage configurations are on the dedicated servers page. The Xeon servers are delivered in under an hour; the EPYC servers are built to order, and checkout shows the delivery estimate before you pay.

The decision table

The cost comparison people expect to go the other way

Take eight modest machines, each with 8 GB of RAM and a couple of cores. As virtual machines that is eight Core plans, which in Bucharest is €88 a month and in Frankfurt or Vienna €136. As bare metal it is one Dual Xeon E5 2630 v3 at €209, with 128 GB of RAM in it rather than 64 GB, and every core yours.

So the crossover is real but it is further out than people assume, and the bare metal side comes with a job attached. On a dedicated hypervisor you own the patching, the storage layout, the backups, the networking and the recovery when a disk dies. On a VPS we own all of that. Count your own hours before you count the euro, because the eight virtual machines are also eight independent failure domains across seven cities if you want them to be, which one physical box can never be.

Containers cover more ground than people think

Most "I need my own hypervisor" requirements turn out to be isolation requirements, and containers answer those on a single virtual machine. Separate dependency stacks, separate network namespaces, resource limits per service, reproducible deployment, one command to rebuild. What they do not give you is a different kernel per workload or a different operating system per workload. If you do not need either of those, you do not need a hypervisor. Our guide to containers on a VPS covers the practical setup.

Prototype on hourly, then decide

The cheapest way to find out how much machine a workload really needs is to run it. Every VPS plan is available by the hour at the monthly price divided by 720 plus the location fee divided by 720. A Titan, our 32 GB plan, is €0.1167 an hour in Frankfurt or Vienna, so a full day of load testing the heaviest thing you plan to virtualise is €2.80.

Run the real workload on a single large virtual machine for a day. If it fits with headroom, you never needed the hypervisor. If it saturates a Titan, you now have a measured number to size bare metal against instead of a guess. Delete the machine when you are done, since a powered off machine still holds its disk and its address, and put anything permanent on a monthly cycle because 720 hourly units cost exactly one month.

Where the cities come in

Virtual machines run in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Vienna, Warsaw, Bucharest and Sofia, and in Ashburn in the US East region. Dedicated servers can be ordered in eleven countries. If your reason for wanting your own host is that you need machines in several places, that argues for virtual machines rather than against them, because five VPS in five cities is a thing one dedicated server cannot be. Per city prices are in our price by location breakdown and the sites themselves are described on the locations page.

Where to start

If you are not sure which side of the line you are on, start on the VPS side. It is cheaper, it is faster to get, and the migration path upward exists. Plans are on the VPS page. If you already know you need a hypervisor and want the storage layout discussed before you order, reply to any email from us with the machine count and the workload and we will tell you which chassis fits.