How to read a VPS plan: CPU, RAM, disk and network

A VPS card usually shows four numbers: CPU, RAM, disk and network. “More is better” is a weak rule. A site can crawl on “4 cores” and a small bot can run fine on 1 vCPU and 1 GB RAM.

Use this as a reading order when you open the VPS ranking.

CPU: cores, vCPU and advertised GHz

vCPU is a share of hypervisor time, not always a full physical core. “2 vCPU” at two providers can feel 1.5–2× apart.

Check:

• virtualization — KVM is usually more predictable than OpenVZ/LXC for CPU;
• steal / limits — oversold nodes still list cores, but wait time grows;
• burst frequency — “up to 3.7 GHz” does not mean that under load.

CPU matters for builds, video, heavy uncached PHP, many concurrent expensive requests. It is secondary for a cached blog, a small bot, a landing page, a CRM with a handful of users.

Do not buy “8 vCPU / 1 GB RAM”. Web stacks more often hit memory and disk first.

RAM: the usual bottleneck

Rough starting points:

• 1 GB — one light site or a simple bot;
• 2 GB — WordPress with plugins, a small shop, bot + database;
• 4 GB — several sites, a Docker stack, a heavier CMS;
• 8+ GB — heavy CMS, queues, analytics, a dedicated database.

Also check what the OS already eats. Windows VPS at 2 GB leaves almost nothing. Ubuntu with a panel is still less free RAM than the price card shows.

Disk: NVMe vs SSD vs HDD

For sites and bots, IOPS and latency beat raw gigabytes. NVMe is the default for anything with a database. HDD is fine for backups and cold files, not for MySQL on the same volume as the app.

If the plan does not name the disk type, treat it as unknown — not as NVMe.

Network: port vs traffic

A “1 Gbit port” is a cap, not your speed to visitors. What matters:

• datacenter country relative to users;
• fair-use traffic — some “unmetered” plans throttle after a quiet threshold;
• DDoS policy — included filter vs paid add-on.

Open the provider card, read the plan line, then compare two or three options in Compare before you pay.