NulNetVPS vs Dedicated — When to Switch (Same Crypto Checkout)
CPU steal, ECC RAM, NVMe queues, IPMI. VPS tops out at $33.50; dedicated Shield sits at $30.80 annual-eff. One crypto invoice for both.
El artículo largo está en inglés. Cabecera, catálogo y caja están traducidos.
The short version
Stay on a VPS while the workload fits a slice of a shared EPYC or Xeon host: web apps, a WireGuard endpoint, a pruned chain node, CI, a game instance. Move to metal when one of four things is true — a whole socket is needed, storage queues are the product, the kernel itself gets replaced, or out-of-band console access matters. Both classes bill through the same crypto invoice, so this is hardware math, not a payment-rail decision.
VPS from $3* (fund $50+), storage 1–5 TB NVMe from $24/mo annual-eff, dedicated with IPMI from $30.80/mo. Crypto invoice, no KYC.
Launch nowFour numbers that decide it
CPU steal first: persistently above a few percent, a neighbour is eating your clock. Second, resident memory against plan RAM — once you swap to NVMe, the disk is the bottleneck. Third, sustained write bandwidth, which databases and chainstate punish first on shared queues. Fourth, IPMI and RAID choice, which no VPS plan offers; every dedicated tier here ships IPMI, ECC and RAID 0/1 by default.
Where the price lines cross
On NulNet the VPS catalog tops out at Sentinel, 12 vCPU / 32 GB, at $33.50/mo list ($26.80 annual-eff). Cheapest metal is Shield — Xeon E-2388G, 8c/16t, 32 GB ECC, 2×500 GB NVMe — at $38.50 list, $30.80 annual-eff. Between those numbers the trade is isolation versus slices, and metal adds 1 Gbps unmetered plus IPMI hand-over. Scaling horizontally with many small boxes? Stay virtual.
What a VPS still does better
Full root on KVM covers nested virtualization, Docker, custom ISOs and raw sockets on every plan, so Tor relays, mail stacks and VPN boxes never need metal. Rebuilds are a panel click, a fresh box images about a minute after an invoice credits, and CPU/RAM resize live. Upgrade for exclusivity, not for features the hypervisor already gives you.
Checkout and provisioning facts
The flow is identical for both classes: plan and term, email or token, a 12-character password, then a live-rate invoice in any of sixteen coins. VPS provisioning starts about a minute after the watcher credits the transfer; dedicated lands 2–4 hours later after racking and IPMI hand-over. Invoice addresses are single-use. If the sizing call is close, the no-KYC dedicated lineup lists every spec next to its list price.
Can I start on a VPS and move to dedicated later?
Yes, though the move is a redeploy, not an upgrade: copy data, cut DNS over, keep the old box for a rollback window. No in-place path exists to exclusive metal.
Which class provisions faster?
VPS, by hours — about a minute after the invoice credits. Dedicated needs 2–4 hours for racking and IPMI hand-over first.
Can I pay for a dedicated server with crypto?
Yes. Both classes draw on the same sixteen-coin checkout — XMR, BTC and the four USDT networks included — and the invoice math is tier-independent.
Do I lose DDoS filtering when I move to metal?
No. L3/L4 filtering runs on dedicated tiers too, and Citadel adds an L3/L7 scrubber. You gain IPMI, so a wedged box is reimaged out-of-band.
Ready to launch?
Build the box — VPS, storage or bare metal — create the password, pay the invoice that follows.