VDS or dedicated server: when to upgrade, according to Contabo
Contabo explains when to migrate from a VPS to a VDS and when a physical server is truly necessary, with Max Performance VPS pricing from €37.13 to €132.33 per month.
UptimeMag editorial team · 22 July 2026 · 2 min read
Anyone running a growing application eventually asks themselves the same question: is the shared VPS no longer enough, but do you really need an entire physical server, or is a VDS sufficient? On 22 July 2026, Contabo published a guide that attempts to provide a technical—not commercial—criterion for deciding.
Test before you spend
Before upgrading your plan, the guide recommends checking the %st column in top or vmstat: this is steal time, the percentage of time your vCPU wanted to work but the hypervisor gave the slot to another tenant. A value between 0 and 1% is typical of truly dedicated allocation, whilst between 1 and 5% during occasional peaks is normal hypervisor scheduling noise. If steal time is close to zero and the server is still struggling, the problem lies elsewhere—I/O wait, undersized RAM, application code—and moving to a VDS won't help.
When a VDS is enough
A VDS (Virtual Dedicated Server) reserves CPU cores and RAM inside a virtual machine: no other tenant touches those resources, but the physical machine underneath remains shared with other VMs. The upgrade makes sense when the VPS shows real contention that varies over time, load grows unpredictably, or the budget can't stretch to a dedicated server but the shared VPS no longer suffices.
When you need true bare metal
A physical server remains necessary when load consistently saturates 32 cores and 128 GB of RAM—the threshold at which a VDS of that size costs as much as a comparable dedicated server—or when you need multi-GPU passthrough or regulatory requirements that demand hardware isolation, not just resource isolation.
Max Performance VPS (Cloud VDS) pricing
Verified on Contabo's official price list, 24-month term, VAT included:
| Plan | Virtual cores | RAM | NVMe | Price/month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud VDS S | 6 | 24 GB | 180 GB | €39.20 |
| Cloud VDS M | 8 | 32 GB | 240 GB | €49.60 |
| Cloud VDS L | 12 | 48 GB | 360 GB | €69.60 |
| Cloud VDS XL | 16 | 64 GB | 480 GB | €94.40 |
| Cloud VDS XXL | 24 | 96 GB | 720 GB | €139.20 |
Source: contabo.com/pricing. The Max Performance VPS plans run on the same control panel and account as shared VPS: an upgrade is simply a plan change, not a move to a new provider. Migration to a dedicated server, however, remains a data migration with a maintenance window you need to schedule.
Written with the help of artificial intelligence and checked by the editors (EU AI Act, art. 50).