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How to find an EU VPS provider for a long-term business

A few times a week someone asks "which VPS should I pick?". This is where we would start, even though we are a provider ourselves.

First, maybe you don't need us at all

  1. You know what you are doing: get Hetzner. You are on your own, and that is fine.
  2. You want to play and learn for almost no money: get TierHive.

If neither fits, because you have paying clients and need someone on the other side who works with you instead of treating you like a number in a queue, keep reading.

Talk to them before you pay

Email a few providers first. The quality of the reply tells you everything: a provider with its own infrastructure answers on the spot, a reseller "passes it to the team".

  • Hourly billing. You can leave in 24 hours, not in a year.
  • Reviews. Check Trustpilot or SmartCustomer for the support rating.
  • Tell them your workload. A real provider steers you, for example HA storage or local disk. No questions back means they don't care.
  • Ask the oversell ratio. Skip anything above 5:1.
  • Ask the CPU cap. Higher is better.

Then test it yourself

  • Watch steal time. Get a VM, don't say it is yours, run top and watch %st. This is where the real oversell shows.
  • Run YABS. Paste the result into ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to judge the numbers against the price.

Pick the right CPU for the job

  • Consumer Ryzen, i7, i9: lots of GHz. Good for game servers, single-threaded apps and LLMs.
  • Enterprise Xeon or EPYC: sustained 24/7 load, ECC memory, databases.
  • Ask what the fleet runs (Skylake, Cascade Lake, Ice Lake, Xeon 6). A consistent fleet means a planned provider. A mix of everything means eBay deals.
  • Fleet uniformity also tells you how long they have been doing this.

Storage

"Fast NVMe" sounds great. Ask whether it is local, or an array in the next building. That is the part they forget to mention.

Heavy or unusual workloads

High-traffic VPN, lots of seeding, CPU-heavy automation?

  • Tell the provider up front.
  • Ask how they isolate it.
  • Good providers keep it off shared nodes. If they cannot answer, walk away.

Trivia

The oversell ratio is the most important number next to the CPU cap, and you almost never hear about it. There is a reason for that. You would rather have a 15-year-old Sandy Bridge CPU (Geekbench around 1300) at 2:1 oversell than the newest 5 GHz Ryzen at 10:1. We promise.

Geekbench is as relevant for a VPS as 0 to 100 km/h acceleration is for a Scania truck. It is the wrong benchmark for the job. For a VPS you want to know:

  • steal time,
  • storage latency,
  • network consistency at peak hours.

How a CPU bursts for 90 seconds matters for rendering and LLM inference, not for a server that runs all year.

Our own numbers

Our CPU is not capped, with a maximum of 3 vCPUs per physical thread. See the benchmark of our entry VPS on a busy production node.