Every week someone writes to us asking which plan they should pick. Usually the answer is simpler than they think.

If you’re shopping for a VPS right now, here’s how we break it down, and what the plans on our pricing page actually mean in practice.

Start with what you’re actually running

A VPS is just a small computer you rent. What matters is what you plan to put on it.

  • A personal website, a portfolio, a small blog: you barely need anything. Most people on VPS 1 (1 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 50 GB SSD) never come close to the limits.
  • A shop, a medium WordPress site, a game server for a few friends: VPS 2 (4 vCPU, 10 GB RAM) or VPS 3 (6 vCPU, 16 GB RAM) is the sweet spot.
  • An app with real traffic, a database, or several projects at once: this is where VPS 4 and up start to make sense.

The honest advice: most people overestimate their needs. It’s easier to upgrade later than to pay a year for power you don’t use.

The three numbers that matter

Forget the marketing for a second. Three numbers decide almost everything.

  1. CPU. Single-core speed matters more than core count for most sites. All our plans run on 3.30 GHz cores, so a 4 vCPU plan isn’t four weak cores. It’s four fast ones.
  2. RAM. This is the one that gets you. If your site runs out of RAM, it doesn’t matter how fast the CPU is. Pick RAM first, then look at everything else.
  3. Storage. We use SSD on every plan. The difference between SSD and a regular SSD is something you feel the moment the server gets busy.

Traffic is a non-issue here. Every Colcado plan comes with unmetered traffic on a 1 Gbps port. We found the whole “5 TB and then we throttle you” thing annoying when we were customers ourselves, so we don’t do it.

What to watch out for with cheap hosts

We have rented from a lot of providers over the years, and a few habits kept showing up. Here is what we would never do to our customers:

  • Advertise one price and add fees at checkout.
  • Promise “unlimited” traffic with a small-print cap.
  • Answer support tickets in three days, or not at all.
  • Claim the server is “in Europe” while the ping tells a different story.

Our servers sit in Giurgiu, Romania, on hardware we check regularly. If something breaks, you talk to a person, not a ticket bot.

Which plan is right for you

A rough guide based on what our customers actually run:

What you’re doing Plan Price
Personal site, small blog, learning VPS 1 $48/year
WordPress, small shop, game server VPS 2 $7.50/month
Growing site, a few projects VPS 3 $12.50/month
App with real traffic, databases VPS 4 $19.50/month
Anything heavier VPS 5 and up $38/month and up

The yearly price on VPS 1 works out to $4 a month. For a server with 4 GB of RAM and a public IP, that’s hard to beat.

Still not sure?

That’s what we’re here for. Write to us at support@colcado.com before you order and tell us what you’re planning to run. We’ll tell you the smallest plan that does the job, even if it’s not the most expensive one.