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. Egress pricing (it's often the biggest cost)
Many providers give you a small bandwidth allowance and then charge $0.01–0.09/GB for overage. On a high-traffic application, bandwidth costs can dwarf the base server cost. A provider with a generous allowance or free egress fundamentally changes the economics.
CherryServers includes 100TB free outbound on all VPS plans. VPSBG's pricing is competitive for EU workloads. InterServer includes 2TB/slice. Run your expected monthly traffic through each provider's pricing calculator before deciding.
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.
VPSBG offers both Cloud VPS (shared) and VDS (dedicated cores). CherryServers has Cloud VPS and Cloud VDS tiers. 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. VPSBG and CherryServers cover the EU. CherryServers adds Singapore for Asia-Pacific coverage.
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 $2.50/mo shared hosting price lock 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. CherryServers averaged 52 seconds across our 11 test interactions with knowledgeable engineers. InterServer's in-house support resolved issues on first contact 87% of the time.
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. CherryServers offers hourly billing on all VPS and dedicated tiers — a significant operational advantage for variable workloads.