VPS vs dedicated server
When a VPS is genuinely enough, when dedicated hardware is worth four times the price, and the specific signals that tell you it is time to move.
Most people asking this question want a VPS. Dedicated hardware solves a specific set of problems, and if you do not have one of those problems you are paying four times as much for headroom you will not use.
Here is how to tell.
| Criterion | NimbusVPS | Dedicated server |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $2.90/month | $79/month |
| Provisioning time | Target: under 5 minutes | 4–24 hours |
| Resource isolation | Dedicated allocation, shared host | Entire physical machine |
| Noisy-neighbour risk | Low but non-zero | None |
| Peak I/O performance | Excellent (NVMe RAID-10, shared) | Higher and fully predictable |
| Bandwidth | Allowance then throttle | Unmetered on a 1–10 Gbps port |
| Scaling up | Resize in the panel, one reboot | Physical intervention or a new machine |
| Scaling down | CPU and RAM down; disk cannot shrink | Not practical |
| Nested virtualisation | Supported | Supported, better performance |
| Out-of-band management | Browser KVM console | Full IPMI / Redfish |
| Hardware failure impact | Live-migrated to a healthy node | Downtime until the part is replaced |
| Cost of over-provisioning | Low — resize down | High — you bought the whole box |
Choose NimbusVPS if…
- You need under 32 vCPU and under 128 GB of memory
- Your load is variable and you would rather resize than over-buy
- You want the server today rather than tomorrow
- Budget matters and you have not yet proven you need more
- You want hardware failure to be a live migration rather than an outage
Choose dedicated server if…
- Sustained CPU at 100% across all cores, continuously
- Disk I/O is your bottleneck and you have measured it
- You need unmetered bandwidth on a 10 Gbps port
- You are running a hypervisor and want the whole machine
- Compliance or contract requires physically dedicated hardware
- You want to announce your own IP prefix over BGP
We would rather you buy the right thing elsewhere than the wrong thing here. A refund request in week two costs us more than a sale we never made.
Questions
When should I move from a VPS to a dedicated server?
When you have measured a bottleneck that more vCPU cannot fix. The concrete signals: steal time consistently above 5% in top, disk latency above 10 ms under normal load, or bandwidth throttling every month. If you are guessing rather than measuring, resize the VPS first — it is a reboot and a pro-rata invoice, and it answers the question empirically.
Is a VPS slower than a dedicated server?
Per-core performance is close, because a vCPU on our platform is a dedicated thread share on the same EPYC and Ryzen silicon that goes into the dedicated fleet. The differences show up under sustained full load and in disk I/O, where a dedicated machine has the entire array to itself. For the overwhelming majority of workloads the difference is not perceptible.
Can I start with a VPS and move to dedicated later?
Yes, and it is the sensible order. Take a snapshot of the VPS, we restore it onto the dedicated machine, and you switch DNS. Expect 30–60 minutes of transfer for a typical server. There is no penalty for changing your mind and no charge for the migration itself.
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