Managed Kubernetes hides the control plane, the load balancers and the storage behind an API and bills for every gigabyte that leaves. On bare metal, compute is cheaper and egress is flat, but those pieces become yours. The decisions in order, with a costed three-server cluster at the end.
Both give you root over SSH, and on day one they feel the same. The difference shows when you load a kernel module, run Docker, tune the network or install anything that is not Linux. How KVM and containers work, what only your own kernel allows, and the one command that tells you which you have.
Low prices come from three places: paid-off hardware, a thin network, or missing essentials. Only the first is a good trade. What a 2016 dual Xeon gives up against a new EPYC, the network fine print to read, price per thread against a VPS, and four checks to run on delivery.
Port speed, guaranteed rate and traffic allowance are three different numbers, and VPS plan pages love to blur them. What a guaranteed gigabit moves in a month, why bandwidth costs CPU as well, how to test a plan with iperf3, and where a VPS stops and a dedicated server starts.
Generating a token means reading the model's active weights once, so a CPU server's speed ceiling is its memory bandwidth divided by the model's size. The arithmetic, the catch in prompt processing, why two sockets are not twice as fast, and the workloads a big-memory EPYC box genuinely suits.
A handful of caching edges in front of one origin covers most of what a commercial CDN does for a European audience, at a fraction of the per-terabyte price. The architecture, the nginx configuration that does most of the work, how users reach the nearest edge, and where the do-it-yourself version loses.
Most VPS plan pages lead with a price and a vCPU count and leave out the numbers that decide how the machine behaves. The nine to find before you pay, what a good answer looks like, the red flags, and a worked example of matching a workload to a plan.
One rented machine, a free hypervisor, and as many virtual machines as the hardware will hold. How to budget RAM, lay out ZFS, get networking right on a data-centre switch port — the part that differs from a homelab — and keep the backups off the box.
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.