How to choose the right cloud server in 2026

Start from the workload, not the price card

Most sizing mistakes happen in the first minute: you open a pricing page, see four tiers, and pick the second one. Instead, write down three numbers first — your working set (how much data the app touches per minute), your concurrency (requests in flight at peak), and your traffic (GB out per month).

Memory is the honest metric

CPU steals headlines, but almost every small server dies of memory first. A Postgres instance with a 2 GB working set on a 2 GB server will swap, and NVMe or not, swap is death by a thousand page faults. Rule of thumb: RAM = working set × 1.5, then round up.

Disk: latency beats throughput

Sequential MB/s is a demo number. Databases and package managers live on 4K random reads, so what you want is NVMe and a low queue depth. All Exotik cloud lines run local NVMe precisely for this reason.

Traffic policy is part of the price

A "cheap" server with 1 TB of metered traffic and €7/TB overage is not cheap the month you get featured. Check what happens after the included volume: throttling is annoying, overage billing is dangerous, and a wallet-based platform like ours will simply never surprise-bill you — services pause instead of drowning you in debt.

When in doubt

Take the smaller server. Resizing up is a five-minute, data-preserving operation on our platform; paying for idle RAM for a year is not.