Published: 7 October 2026
A dedicated server with Proxmox VE becomes your own small cloud. You create, resize, snapshot and delete virtual machines yourself, the hardware is not shared with anyone outside your account, and one monthly price covers it all however many machines you run. Proxmox VE 9.1 is on our order form, so the server arrives with the hypervisor already installed. Version 8.4 is listed too, but Proxmox ended support for version 8 in August 2026, so choose 9.1 for a new host.
This guide covers how to size a Proxmox host, what IPv4 you need for your guests, and when renting VPS is simply the cheaper option.
Why run Proxmox on a dedicated server
- No neighbours but your own. On a shared cloud, someone else's busy machine can slow yours down. On your own server, the only workloads competing are yours, and you decide how to share the CPU.
- A guaranteed port for all your VMs. Each of our servers has an unmetered, guaranteed port from 1 Gbps upwards, shared only between your own guests.
- DDoS protection included. Every server sits behind 1 Tbps always-on DDoS protection (L3/L4), and so do the guests on it.
- Full control. Custom kernels, nested virtualisation, containers next to VMs, your own firewall rules, your own backup schedule.
- Large machines. A single VM with 64 GB of RAM, or 128 GB on a 256 GB host, costs nothing extra once you have the host.
Sizing the host
CPU
Most VMs sit idle most of the time, so it is normal to give out more virtual cores than the server has threads. A ratio of two to four virtual cores per thread is common for web and office workloads. Keep it closer to one for busy databases and build machines. Our dual E5 2699 v4 has 88 threads; the dual EPYC 9554 has 256.
RAM
RAM is the limit you hit first. Unlike CPU time, it cannot be shared safely between busy guests, so add up what each VM needs and keep some for the host itself. If you use ZFS, its read cache (the ARC) also lives in host memory. Proxmox's rule of thumb is 2 GiB plus 1 GiB per TiB of storage; check the limit after installation and set it so the cache and your guests both fit.
Disks
Use at least two drives so a single failure does not take every VM down. On our Xeon servers the six bays take SATA SSDs, from 2 × 500 GB up to 6 × 8 TB. A ZFS mirror or RAID 10 is a good default for VM disks. The EPYC servers come with 2 × 1 TB NVMe and can take many more NVMe drives, which suits database-heavy guests.
Public IPv4 for the guests
The order form gives each server one IPv4 block. The default /31 has one usable address, which the host itself needs. Pick a larger block instead and the host keeps one address from it:
| Block | Usable addresses | Left for guests | Per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| /29 | 5 | 4 | €8 |
| /28 | 13 | 12 | €26 |
| /27 | 29 | 28 | €58 |
Guests that do not need to be reached from the internet can sit on a private bridge behind the host and share its address. Our post on extra IPv4 for dedicated servers explains why a /29 gives five addresses, not eight, and how to pick a size you will not outgrow.
Four builds, priced
| Build | What you pick | Capacity | Per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home lab and staging | Dual E5 2630 v3, 2 × 500 GB SSD, /29 | 32 threads, 128 GB, 4 guest IPs | €222 |
| Agency host | Dual E5 2690 v4, 6 × 1 TB SSD, /28 | 56 threads, 128 GB, 6 TB raw, 12 guest IPs | €324 |
| Hosting reseller node | Dual E5 2699 v4, 6 × 2 TB SSD, /27 | 88 threads, 256 GB, 12 TB raw, 28 guest IPs | €496 |
| Database-heavy guests | Single EPYC 9254, 2 × 1 TB NVMe, /28 | 48 threads, 128 GB DDR5, 12 guest IPs | €475 |
All four include an unmetered, guaranteed 1 Gbps port. Prices are monthly and exclude VAT. Moving to 2 Gbps adds €50 on the Xeon servers and €80 on the EPYC. If the reseller node will host VMs for customers, read the Hyper-Threading note below first: the EPYC build may be the better base.
When a VPS is the cheaper choice
Be honest about the numbers. Our 8 GB KVM VPS costs €10 a month in Bucharest and €14 to €16 in Warsaw, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Vienna and Ashburn. Twenty-eight of them, one per guest address on the reseller node, cost €280 to €448, less than the €496 node. If all you need is a handful of standard small machines, renting VPS is cheaper and you do not have to manage a hypervisor.
The dedicated host wins when:
- you need large VMs, or many VMs of different shapes;
- you need guaranteed bandwidth. Our VPS run on a shared 1 Gbps port, while the dedicated port is reserved for you;
- you want control over the hypervisor itself: snapshots, your own Proxmox Backup Server, nested virtualisation;
- you resell VMs to your own customers and want your own platform under them.
If you want to resell VPS without running a hypervisor at all, look at our VPS reseller programme instead.
Practical tips
- Back up off the box. Proxmox Backup Server on a second server in another country protects you from losing the host. Our post on automated offsite backups walks through it.
- Plan recovery, not live migration, across countries. Live migration needs a Proxmox cluster, and Proxmox clusters need under 5 ms between nodes. Run hosts in different countries as separate installs: restoring from Proxmox Backup Server gets your VMs back after a failure, and restored guests take addresses from the second host's block.
- Hyper-Threading on Xeon E5. Haswell and Broadwell chips need the L1TF and MDS mitigations. If you host VMs for people you do not trust, the safe setting is Hyper-Threading off, which halves the thread count. AMD EPYC is not affected by those two.
- Lock down the web interface. Put the Proxmox interface behind a firewall rule or a VPN rather than leaving port 8006 open to the world.
- Licences. Proxmox VE is free and open source, with optional paid support subscriptions. Windows guests need their own Windows licences.
Ordering
Pick a server on the dedicated servers page, add drives and an IPv4 block, and choose Proxmox VE 9.1 as the operating system. Xeon servers in stock are typically online within about an hour.