Thoughts, tutorials, and insights from the trenches.
There is no single 'best' VPS provider. But there is a short list of questions that narrows down the options extremely fast, and almost none of them are on the specs page.
AWS is the absolute default answer for a lot of clients before they have ever priced anything out. For plenty of small and mid-size workloads, a plain VPS from OVH, Contabo, or Hetzner does the exact same job for a tiny fraction of the bill, and the bill is entirely predictable too.
Clicking through a VM creation wizard is totally fine the very first time. The second, third, and fortieth time, a single `virt-install` command with a cloud-init seed does the exact same job in seconds.
A snapshot taken thirty seconds before a risky change is one of the most incredibly useful tools in Proxmox. It is also completely useless as a backup.
Clients often want to move to a dedicated server for 'better performance.' Usually, they don't need it. Here is how I actually decide.