Comparing and choosing a VPS: what to look at beyond the price

The previous article in this series asked whether your own server pays off at all. If the answer is “yes”, a harder question follows: who to rent it from, and which one to choose. There are dozens of offers, they look similar, and they differ in things a comparison table usually leaves out.

This article is about those things. I am not declaring a winner, because I have not run performance tests on every machine. I am showing the criteria I used to choose, prices read on September 9, 2026, and a breakdown of my own bill, so it is clear what such an amount is made of.

The list price is rarely the price on the invoice

Before I get to specifications, one thing about money, because it spoils more comparisons than anything else.

The price on the front page is often the first-period price, and a very different one from the next period. At nazwa.pl the VPS Linux Start plan costs 25 złoty net a month on promotion and 100 złoty at the standard price, four times more. At home.pl the VPS Linux S plan is 45 złoty net for the first three months and 150 złoty for every following three months, a gap of 70 percent, and the provider itself states it right next to the price. cyber_Folks lists promotional prices on its plans and announces the regular prices for the following periods.

Nobody hides this, because both figures usually sit side by side with a note about the first billing period. It is nonetheless easy to compare one provider’s promotional price with another’s regular price and draw the opposite conclusion from the true one.

Add-ons come on top of the machine’s price, and you will rarely do without them. My bill for July 2026 came to 138.38 złoty gross, of which the machine itself was 85.20 złoty net. The rest is an automatic backup and a snapshot, a quarter of the bill. I pay for them by choice, because the provider does not force them on me, but for a server of my own I do not see another sensible choice. I give a line-by-line breakdown further down, in the section on what I pay and for what.

The billing period varies and it changes the comparison. OVHcloud’s price list states monthly amounts, net and gross side by side, preceded by the word “from”, and cyber_Folks also states its prices monthly. Mikr.us bills only a full year upfront. home.pl sells in three-month periods, and nazwa.pl offers a choice between a month, a quarter and a year, billed upfront for the whole period. When comparing offers, it is worth reducing everything to one unit and working out the two-year cost, because only over two years does it become clear how much renewal costs once the promotion ends.

Six criteria that really make a difference

1. Where the machine physically sits

A server sits in a specific building, in a specific country, and that has three consequences. The first is legal: it is easier to demonstrate compliance with personal data protection rules when client data does not leave the European Union, and easiest when it stays in Poland. The second is technical: the greater the distance between the server and the person using it, the longer every request travels. It shows up when pages load and when working in admin panels. The third is practical: when something breaks, you are talking to support working in the same time zone.

My machine sits in OVHcloud’s Warsaw data center. Mikr.us places its machines in Finland. home.pl points to Berlin for its VPS Linux package and states that its data centers are in Europe and comply with personal data protection requirements. nazwa.pl mentions a choice of location but does not name specific cities on its offer page.

None of that disqualifies any of these offers, but it is information that comparison tables usually leave out, and it can matter more than the core count. It is worth confirming before ordering, because “in Europe” and “in Poland” are not the same thing when client data is going to live on the server.

2. What a “core” means, and whether the virtualization is full

Two servers with four cores each can perform twice as differently, because not all cores are equal. Three things are worth checking in the description: the type of processor, whether its power is dedicated or shared with neighbors, and the kind of virtualization used.

The difference can be fundamental. Mikr.us states outright that it sells LXC containers, with processor power assigned dynamically and a doubled limit on the plans marked PRO. A container is not the same thing as a virtual machine: it shares the kernel with the host, so you cannot install just any operating system on it, or anything that requires its own kernel. At 130 złoty a year that is an honestly drawn product boundary, not a flaw hidden in a footnote.

cyber_Folks states KVM virtualization and AMD EPYC processors, nazwa.pl also KVM and EPYC, and OVHcloud, in my case, KVM on the OpenStack platform. These are full virtual machines with their own kernel.

3. Backups: who makes them, where they live, and how far back they go

This is the most often overlooked line item, and the most important one once you have your own server. There are three questions: whether the backup is included in the price, whether it lives off that machine, and how many days of history it covers.

In cyber_Folks’ offer the provider copies the whole machine to an external server every day, and the history reaches 28 days. In my case a backup with seven days of history is a paid option and costs 21.20 złoty net a month. Adding that line item can flip the outcome of a comparison: a cheaper machine stops being cheaper once you have to buy a backup for it, while a pricier one already has it included.

A separate matter: a backup nobody has ever restored is a promise, not a backup. That no longer depends on the provider, only on whoever runs the server.

4. Can you grow without moving house

A server is sized to today’s needs, and needs grow. So the question is what happens when the machine stops being enough: is it enough to change the plan, or do you have to rent a second machine and move everything over by hand.

For me that moment came on April 18, 2026. A machine with six cores, eleven gigabytes of memory and a hundred-gigabyte disk stopped being enough, so I switched to a bigger offer: eight cores, twenty-four gigabytes of memory, two hundred gigabytes of disk. The change cost a one-off 29.95 złoty, and the monthly bill rose from about 54 złoty to 138.38 złoty. I did not move any data, did not rebuild the system from scratch, and did not change the IP address.

That single operation is the main reason I stay with this provider, and I come back to it below.

5. What else you can buy from the same provider

A server rarely lives alone. Sooner or later you need a domain, a DNS zone, an email address, a certificate, storage for backups off the machine, sometimes a second server or a private network between them. You can collect these services from five different providers, and it usually comes out cheaper. The cost is that when something breaks you have to work out on your own whose side the problem is on, and each of those services has its own account, its own invoice and its own renewal date.

With one provider you pay more, but you buy a single place where everything is visible.

6. Billing: currency, invoice, length of commitment

For a company in Poland, the boring things count: a VAT invoice with a Polish tax number, a price in złoty rather than euros converted at the exchange rate on the day you are charged, and whether the contract locks you in for a year or lets you leave after a month. It is worth checking this before ordering, not after the first invoice.

What the offers look like: a reading from September 9, 2026

The figures below come from price lists read on a single day and may have changed since. Treat this table as a picture of the market, not as a current price list.

The comparison covers only machines with power similar to mine or smaller, meaning up to eight cores, twenty-four gigabytes of memory and two hundred gigabytes of disk. Every provider described here also has larger machines on offer, some of them much larger. They are not in the table, because this article answers the question of what you get for what I pay today, and for less, not the question of how far the market’s offer reaches.

One more thing about this table: the amounts in the “price” column are not directly comparable, because each of these providers bills over a different period, as noted above.

These are net, headline prices. The amount in the cart tends to be higher, because it depends on the options chosen, and the table does not cover that.

What I pay, and for what

My bill for July 2026, line by line, in net amounts:

• VPS machine: 85.20 PLN,
• automatic backup with seven days of history: 21.20 PLN,
• snapshot: 6.10 PLN,
• total net 112.50 PLN, with tax 138.38 PLN.

This machine runs visit analytics, project management, time tracking, automations, monitoring and backups, alongside websites. Every one of these tools has an equivalent you pay a monthly subscription for. Every further tool I start on this server does not add a single złoty to the bill, for as long as there is enough memory and disk space.

Why I chose OVHcloud

Three reasons, in order of weight.

Scaling works, and I have proven it on my own machine. Growing the server was a plan change costing 29.95 złoty, not a move. That takes the whole weight off the decision of what size to buy: instead of buying a machine “to grow into”, you take a smaller one and change it once it stops being enough. For the first few months I paid 54 złoty a month, and that was the right amount for what was running on the server at the time.

Expansion is flexible beyond the machine itself too. Backups and snapshots are added to the server as options switched on when needed, not as a bundle from the start. The rest works the same way: the IP address, backup storage, another machine.

One provider covers everything a small company needs around a server. I have domains, DNS zones, email and the server itself with the same provider, which means one account, one invoice and one place where I check which service’s term is running out. It even shows on my invoices: alongside the server renewal sit the domain registrations, the DNS zone and the email subscription.

On top of that comes the point I opened this article with: the machine sits in Warsaw, billing runs in złoty, and the invoice is Polish.

When I would choose something else

My choice is not a universal one.

If this were about learning or personal projects, I would take Mikr.us. A hundred and thirty złoty a year for a machine with two gigabytes of memory is a different category of expense, and the provider states the offer’s limits outright. It is worth knowing this line does not stop at the smallest machines: the plan with eight gigabytes of memory costs 395 złoty a year, and the one with sixteen gigabytes 790 złoty, which per month costs less than quite a few of the machines in the table above.

The line here is not drawn by size but by how it works, and the provider is open about it. These are LXC containers, not full virtual machines. Processor power is assigned dynamically, and PRO plans get double the allocation limit. The machine has no IPv4 address of its own: it gets its own IPv6 address plus up to seven ports forwarded from a shared public address, including a dedicated port for SSH. That is enough for many uses, but it needs to be known before ordering, not after.

If I did not want to administer a server myself, I would look for a managed offer, where the provider handles updates and backups. That, though, brings back the conclusion from the previous article: with a single website and no hands of your own for this work, ordinary hosting can be the more sensible choice over your own server.

Checklist before you order

Before you click “order”, check seven things:

1. What the renewal price is, not just the price of the first period.
2. What the cost will be over two years, once every offer is reduced to one unit of time.
3. Whether the backup is included in the price, how long its history is, and whether it lives off that machine.
4. Where the server physically sits, and whether that is enough for the data that will live on it.
5. Whether it is a full virtual machine or a container with a shared kernel.
6. What happens when the machine stops being enough: a plan change or a move.
7. Whether you get a VAT invoice, and in what currency the billing runs.

What comes next in this series

In the next installment I will describe setting up and configuring a server for the first time: what is worth doing in the first hour after getting access, before running anything on it. After that I will go through, one by one, the tools that run on my own server. All the articles sit in the Knowledge section.