Short answer
- **VPS** if you want elasticity, low entry price, and your workload fits on shared hardware.
- **Dedicated** if you need predictable performance, specific hardware (NVMe RAID, NIC, GPU), or you're already running >50% of the largest VPS plan 24/7.
The price gap explained
A €6/month VPS doesn't give you 1/100th of a €600/month dedicated server — it gives you a slice of one with **noisy neighbour** risk. Most of the time, modern hypervisors make this invisible. Sometimes another tenant doing image compression spikes `steal` time and your latency tail blows up.
Where dedicated wins
- **Disk IOPS** are physically yours. A Postgres with a hot working set thanks you.
- **CPU clock** isn't shared. Compilers, video encoders, and ML inference benefit.
- **Licensing**. Some software bills per host or per CPU socket — dedicated saves you over the lifetime.
Where VPS wins
- **Hourly billing**. Test for a day, throw away if it doesn't work.
- **Resize**. Bump RAM and CPU without a migration.
- **Multi-region**. Spin up a copy in another city as a hedge or as a CDN edge.
- **Pricing transparency**. Every line item is on the invoice.
Hybrid pattern
Run your stateful tier (DB, file storage) on a dedicated host, and burst stateless workers / front-ends on VPS instances. Connect them with WireGuard — see [our WireGuard guide](/help/wireguard-vpn-setup).