Every VPS provider leads with the same numbers: vCPU count, RAM, SSD size, bandwidth. Comparing those specs directly misses the factors that determine whether you'll be happy with a provider six months in. Here are the six things we evaluate before committing to any VPS provider.
1. Network quality and DDoS protection
Provider network quality varies more than the marketing suggests. Look for two things: Tier 1 transit relationships (Zayo, GTT, Cogent, Lumen, NTT) and DDoS protection included at the base price. InterServer routes traffic through a 400Gbps Tier 1 ring with Zayo, GTT, Cogent, and Tiscali. Cherry Servers includes premium DDoS protection on every Cloud VPS plan and runs a 100G+ redundant backbone with direct IX peering.
Without DDoS protection, a single cheap attack can take your site offline for hours. Without Tier 1 transit, your latency floor is determined by whichever cheap upstream your provider chose.
2. Shared vs dedicated vCPUs
A shared vCPU is a time-sliced portion of a physical core — your allocation competes with other tenants for CPU cycles. A dedicated vCPU is a physical core reserved exclusively for your server. The performance difference is usually invisible at idle but significant under sustained load.
Cherry Servers offers both shared and dedicated CPU resources at provisioning — picking dedicated mode is effectively a managed slice of bare metal billed by the hour. If your application runs CPU-intensive tasks for more than a few seconds at a time, dedicated vCPUs are worth the premium.
3. Data center location relative to your users
Network latency is determined by physical distance. A user in São Paulo connecting to a server in Frankfurt experiences 150–200ms RTT. The same user connecting to Miami (ServerSP's Digital Realty facility) sees 80–120ms. For interactive applications, 100ms RTT is the boundary where users start noticing delay.
Map your user distribution before choosing a provider. ServerSP wins for US/Latin America with Miami + Brazil nodes. Cherry Servers covers EU (Lithuania, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Stockholm) and Singapore for Asia-Pacific. InterServer's five US data centers cover North American workloads.
4. Renewal pricing vs promotional rate
The price advertised on a hosting provider's homepage is often a limited-term promotional rate that jumps 2–5× on renewal. InterServer's price lock — applied to their $3/mo VPS, $8/mo web hosting, and $2.50/mo email plans — is exceptional precisely because it never changes. Always check the renewal pricing before committing — it's the number that determines your actual long-term cost.
5. Support quality when something breaks
You will eventually need support — a misconfigured firewall, an unexpected kernel panic, a billing issue. Response time and technical competence are the metrics that matter. Cherry Servers averaged 54 seconds across our 12 test interactions with engineers (not scripted first-line support). InterServer's in-house support resolved issues on first contact 87% of the time across our 10 test tickets, with phone support connecting within 3 minutes on every test call.
Avoid providers where support is entirely ticket-based with 24–48 hour response times unless you have an internal team that can handle most issues independently.
6. Hourly vs monthly billing for your use case
If you're running persistent services (web apps, APIs, databases), monthly billing is simpler and often cheaper. If you run batch workloads, burst capacity, or experimental infrastructure, hourly billing makes dedicated hardware economically viable. Cherry Servers offers hourly billing on both Cloud VPS and Instant Dedicated tiers — a significant operational advantage for variable workloads where you don't want to pay full-month for partial usage.