Myth: "A $5 VPS gives you dedicated resources"

Myth: "A $5 VPS gives you dedicated resources"
A developer benchmarked the same Node app on a $5 VPS across a week. CPU steal time — cycles stolen by other tenants on the host CPU — swung from 0% at 4am to 38% at 9pm. Response time tracked it exactly: 90ms quiet, 310ms busy. The "dedicated vCPU" was a time-share that emptied out only when nobody else wanted it. The fix wasn't more RAM; it was a host that doesn't pack 30 VMs onto a 16-core box.
Follow the money: steal time is the host selling the same core twice.
Reality: a "dedicated" vCPU you share by the millisecond is just shared hosting with extra steps.