Managed Cloud vs. raw VPS — when to switch
Signals that you've outgrown VPS or that Managed is the wrong fit.
3 min read
Managed Cloud is the right tier for most production apps. But it's not universally right; here are the signals that point to a switch in either direction.
Move from VPS to Managed Cloud when: you're spending more than half a day a week on OS-level maintenance, your team's bus factor on infra is one, or you find yourself building features you wish your hosting platform had built (zero-downtime deploys, staging clones, auto-scaling).
Stay on VPS when: you need a custom kernel, you run niche middleware that doesn't fit our managed stacks (think old Java EE, exotic database engines, custom hypervisors), or your engineering team explicitly wants the operational depth that comes with root access.
Move from Managed Cloud to Dedicated when: your steady-state CPU sits above 80%, your IO becomes the bottleneck on a database workload, or you need hardware features (GPUs, FPGAs, HSMs) that don't exist on virtualised tiers.