I'm choosing hosting for a production school ERP. The Hostinger VPS I'm considering has 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM and 100 GB NVMe storage. It would run around 8 to 10 Docker containers, with PostgreSQL either on the same VM or a separate one.
Hostinger is much cheaper than a similarly sized EC2 instance. How should I weigh the cost against reliability, consistent performance and the risk of outages?
Compare the actual monthly prices first, including storage, backups and any separate database VM. Also check whether an AWS reserved-capacity discount fits how long you expect to run the system.
A single EC2 instance and a single VPS are both single-server setups. A multi-availability-zone failover setup on AWS is a different comparison and will cost more. How much downtime can the school tolerate, and what would an outage cost?
My bigger concern is the 8 GB of RAM. Eight to ten containers plus PostgreSQL could fit, but the container count alone doesn't tell you much. If their combined memory use gets too high, the server can end up swapping heavily and performance will suffer.
Measure memory under a realistic workload before committing to that size. Moving PostgreSQL to another VM may help with capacity, but include that VM in the price comparison.
Cheaper doesn't automatically mean unreliable, but the specifications alone won't tell you about noisy neighbors, throttling or uptime. Check the provider's terms and monitoring options, and test the workload rather than assuming either host will deliver consistent performance.
Whichever you pick, plan for backups and practice restoring them. That matters separately from how often the server goes down.
Answers are reviewed before publication.
Related Discussions