A VPS plan lists vCPUs the way a server lists cores, but a vCPU is a scheduling promise, not a piece of silicon. What dedicated and shared vCPUs actually guarantee, the one number that exposes contention, and a ten-minute test you can run on any plan.
What you can rent is not this year's Xeon against this year's EPYC but an eight-year spread of generations at prices seven times apart. Per-core speed, memory bandwidth, PCIe lanes and price per core — and which of those differences your workload can actually feel.
Most discrepancies on a new machine are a mis-seated DIMM, a drive pulled from another server, or a NIC that negotiated the wrong speed — all trivial to fix on day one and expensive in month four. An hour of acceptance testing, with the pass conditions.
Both protocols get video from an encoder into your origin; neither is what viewers receive. Judged on that one job, they differ sharply under packet loss — and the SRT latency setting decides whether it helps at all. A comparison, with the pipeline around it.
Capacity is the easy half of a backup. What decides whether it is worth having is how long the restore takes, whether anyone verified the archive, and whether an attacker holding your production credentials can also delete the backups.
Kernel settings are changeable; the distance between your server and your users is physics. Work out the latency floor from the map, understand why interconnection decides how close you get to it, and test from where the users actually are before committing.
Copying data is solved; sequencing is what fails. Lower the TTL two days out, sync in two passes so the window moves only a delta, replicate rather than copy databases, and rehearse the whole cutover once a week early. Plus the six things that always break.
No one can quote a player count without knowing the title, but the shape of the limit is knowable. The tick deadline binds first, memory decides instances per box, and bandwidth binds the fleet rather than the instance. Each has arithmetic you can run on your own numbers.
A streaming server does three jobs with three different bottlenecks. Ingest wants path quality, transcode wants cores, egress wants a port. Size them separately, work a real build end to end, and see why the blended ABR bitrate — not the top rung — sets the uplink.
A virtual machine is a slice of a box; a dedicated server is the box. The useful question is where the slice stops being enough. Four ceilings decide it — single-thread speed, disk latency, packet rate and RAM — and an afternoon of measurement settles it better than a year of guessing.
A game server is a simulation loop with a fixed deadline, and no amount of cores makes one thread finish sooner. What to buy for a single instance, what to buy for density, and why jitter beats port size.
A stock kernel moves a few gigabits and then flattens. The bandwidth-delay arithmetic behind it, the sysctl ceilings to raise, the NIC queue work that follows, and the nginx settings that stop copying bytes.