[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":180},["ShallowReactive",2],{"guide-\u002Fguides\u002Fshared-vs-dedicated-vcpu":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"date":170,"description":171,"draft":172,"extension":173,"meta":174,"navigation":175,"path":176,"seo":177,"stem":178,"__hash__":179},"guides\u002Fguides\u002Fshared-vs-dedicated-vcpu.md","Shared vs. Dedicated vCPU, Explained",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":159},"minimark",[9,13,18,21,25,28,32,35,39,42,113,116,120,123,131,138,145,149,152,156],[10,11,12],"p",{},"Almost every VPS plan lists a vCPU count, and almost none of them explain what that vCPU actually is. That gap matters, because \"1 vCPU\" on a shared plan and \"1 vCPU\" on a dedicated plan can perform very differently under load, even though the listing looks identical. Here's what the terms mean, how to spot which one a provider is selling you, and what the price difference actually buys.",[14,15,17],"h2",{"id":16},"what-vcpu-means-in-the-first-place","What \"vCPU\" means in the first place",[10,19,20],{},"A vCPU is a virtual CPU core, a slice of processing time that a hypervisor hands out to a virtual machine. It's not a physical chip you can point to. The hypervisor is the layer of software that carves up a physical server's real cores and RAM among however many virtual machines are running on it.",[14,22,24],{"id":23},"shared-your-core-on-a-timeshare","Shared: your core, on a timeshare",[10,26,27],{},"On a shared-vCPU plan, the physical core backing your vCPU is also backing other tenants' vCPUs on the same host. The hypervisor schedules time on that core between everyone sharing it. Most of the time this is invisible: the host isn't fully loaded, and your slice of CPU time shows up when you need it. But if another tenant on the same physical machine spikes hard (a \"noisy neighbor,\" in the term everyone in hosting uses for this), your own performance can dip even though nothing changed on your end. Providers oversell shared capacity to keep prices low, which is exactly why shared plans are consistently the cheapest entry point into VPS hosting.",[14,29,31],{"id":30},"dedicated-the-whole-core-reserved","Dedicated: the whole core, reserved",[10,33,34],{},"A dedicated vCPU is a physical core (or a fixed slice of one) reserved exclusively for your virtual machine. Nobody else's workload competes for it. You get consistent, predictable CPU performance, which is what makes dedicated cores the standard recommendation for production databases, anything CPU-bound (video transcoding, build servers, compute-heavy APIs), or workloads where latency spikes are actually costly.",[14,36,38],{"id":37},"how-to-tell-which-one-youre-buying","How to tell which one you're buying",[10,40,41],{},"Providers disclose this differently, and it's rarely spelled out on the pricing page:",[43,44,45,66,88,98,107],"ul",{},[46,47,48,52,53,57,58,61,62,65],"li",{},[49,50,51],"strong",{},"Vultr",": plan codes starting ",[54,55,56],"code",{},"vc2"," are shared; ",[54,59,60],{},"vhf"," (high frequency) and ",[54,63,64],{},"vhp"," (high performance) are dedicated.",[46,67,68,71,72,75,76,79,80,83,84,87],{},[49,69,70],{},"DigitalOcean",": plan slugs starting with ",[54,73,74],{},"s-"," are shared \"Basic\" droplets; ",[54,77,78],{},"c-",", ",[54,81,82],{},"g-",", and ",[54,85,86],{},"m-"," prefixes are dedicated CPU-optimized, general-purpose, and memory-optimized droplets.",[46,89,90,93,94,97],{},[49,91,92],{},"Hetzner",": exposes a ",[54,95,96],{},"cpu_type"," field directly on each server type in its pricing API, so there's no guesswork.",[46,99,100,93,103,106],{},[49,101,102],{},"Scaleway",[54,104,105],{},"hardware.cpu.shared"," boolean directly in its product catalog, same idea.",[46,108,109,112],{},[49,110,111],{},"Cherry Servers",": sells dedicated cores by default across its bare metal line, which is the core of its product, rather than treating dedicated as a premium add-on tier.",[10,114,115],{},"vpsudo's own offer table shows a CPU type badge on every listing where the provider discloses it, so you don't have to go digging through plan-code conventions yourself.",[14,117,119],{"id":118},"what-the-price-gap-actually-looks-like","What the price gap actually looks like",[10,121,122],{},"This is where it gets concrete, and the gap is smaller than you'd guess in some cases and much bigger in others.",[10,124,125,126,130],{},"On ",[127,128,51],"a",{"href":129},"\u002Fproviders\u002Fvultr",", the shared plan vc2-1c-1gb (1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, SSD storage) runs $5 a month. The dedicated equivalent, vhf-1c-1gb (1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, but on NVMe storage), is $6. That's a $1 premium that also happens to come with faster storage as a bonus, since Vultr's dedicated tier runs on NVMe while its shared tier runs on plain SSD.",[10,132,125,133,137],{},[127,134,136],{"href":135},"\u002Fproviders\u002Flinode","Linode",", the gap is proportionally bigger. The shared plan g6-standard-2 (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, 80GB SSD) is $24 a month. The dedicated plan g6-dedicated-2, with the exact same 2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, and 80GB SSD spec, is $36. That's a 50% markup for the identical resource numbers, purely for the guarantee that those two cores are yours alone.",[10,139,140,141,144],{},"And then there's ",[127,142,111],{"href":143},"\u002Fproviders\u002Fcherry-servers",", which doesn't really sell a \"shared vs. dedicated\" upgrade path so much as two different product lines: its shared VPS plans start around $3 a month, while its bare metal line, dedicated by definition since there's no hypervisor at all, starts at $49 a month for a 4-core, 16GB box. That's not really the same axis of comparison as the Vultr or Linode examples, but it shows how wide the range gets once \"dedicated\" means an entire physical server rather than a reserved slice of one.",[14,146,148],{"id":147},"when-shared-is-genuinely-fine","When shared is genuinely fine",[10,150,151],{},"Don't read any of this as \"always buy dedicated.\" A lot of workloads never come close to saturating a shared core: static sites, low-traffic APIs, dev and staging environments, personal projects, anything where a brief CPU dip during someone else's spike is a non-event. Shared plans exist because most VPS traffic doesn't need guaranteed cores, and paying the dedicated premium for a workload that never touches its ceiling is money spent on a guarantee you'll never redeem.",[14,153,155],{"id":154},"when-dedicated-earns-its-premium","When dedicated earns its premium",[10,157,158],{},"The cases where it's worth paying up: production databases, anything with a latency SLA, CPU-bound batch jobs, and workloads where a performance dip during someone else's traffic spike would actually cost you (a checkout flow, a real-time API). If your workload falls in that bucket, the premium in the examples above (a dollar on Vultr, 50% on Linode) is usually cheap insurance against a problem that's genuinely hard to debug after the fact, because a noisy-neighbor slowdown looks identical to your own code being slow until you know to look for it.",{"title":160,"searchDepth":161,"depth":161,"links":162},"",2,[163,164,165,166,167,168,169],{"id":16,"depth":161,"text":17},{"id":23,"depth":161,"text":24},{"id":30,"depth":161,"text":31},{"id":37,"depth":161,"text":38},{"id":118,"depth":161,"text":119},{"id":147,"depth":161,"text":148},{"id":154,"depth":161,"text":155},"2026-07-10","What 'shared' and 'dedicated' actually mean on a VPS plan, how to tell which one you're looking at, and real price gaps between the two from live provider data.",false,"md",{},true,"\u002Fguides\u002Fshared-vs-dedicated-vcpu",{"title":5,"description":171},"guides\u002Fshared-vs-dedicated-vcpu","em2sfWrIkCXcLZIk9Ka17N48rpNdkP4aR_dOXP10CUk",1785111509426]