VPS, PaaS or Kubernetes for a small service fleet?

Your team runs an API, a few bots, a database and nightly jobs. They fit on one VPS, but operating-system updates and manual restarts take time away from the product. Should you move to a PaaS or build a Kubernetes cluster?

Service count alone does not answer that question. Network requirements, data durability, downtime costs and operating experience matter more.

Inventory the workload first

Record each service’s start command, memory use, CPU profile, incoming ports, external dependencies and persistent data. Note what happens on restart and whether two copies may safely run together.

A successful HTTP request does not test a long-lived WebSocket. Exercise the upgrade, idle timeout, reconnect path and a deployment while a connection is active.

When a VPS is the right choice

A VPS gives you control over the operating system, network rules and unusual daemons. Small processes can share a host efficiently through systemd or containers. Your team remains responsible for updates, firewalls, certificates, disk pressure and host recovery.

Compare operating effort as well as rent. An internal model might be hosting plus backup storage plus maintenance hours multiplied by an hourly cost. Even without pricing every hour, knowing how many evenings infrastructure consumes is useful.

One host is still one failure domain. A backup on the same disk does not protect against losing that disk. Restore the database in a separate environment before migration and measure recovery time.

When a PaaS removes enough work

A PaaS is useful when your application fits its deployment contract and you want the provider to handle part of the operation. Benefits typically include builds, releases, routing, logs and variables. Check the actual product: a PostgreSQL template is not automatically a managed database with automated recovery.

Compare pricing against your real service inventory. Plans may limit a shared resource pool, each application’s size, replica count or storage. Those limits differ. Inquir plans describe an available pool; compare application settings with the current pricing page before moving workloads.

For illustration, sixteen services with a memory limit of 128 MiB each sum to 2 GiB of limits. That does not prove the whole system fits in 2 GiB: databases, caches and deployment overlap also require capacity. Actual consumption and reserved resources may differ.

Arbitrary public TCP is not a universal PaaS feature. At publication time, Inquir does not provide general public TCP ingress for applications. Private TCP connections within a project do not replace it. If your service depends on its own TLS listener on a nonstandard public port, verify that requirement before migrating.

When Kubernetes is justified

Kubernetes can make sense for multi-node placement, custom operators and many workloads when the team can operate it. The official overview describes a container-workload platform, not a complete answer to every operational problem.

You still design access control, upgrades, observability and data recovery. A database does not gain backups merely by running in a StatefulSet. Operators can automate procedures, but configuration and restore drills remain necessary.

For three small applications, a cluster may create more work than it removes. For a team with established platform expertise, it can standardize operation across many projects. Choose based on requirements and existing skills.

Evaluate Inquir with one application

Choose a stateless HTTP service. Prepare its Dockerfile, start command, variables and health endpoint. In the console, create a project and an application, configure its HTTP port and health path, then build from source or deploy an image. Enable public access if the service must be reachable from the internet. Use test data and verify logs, a release and a rollback using the application documentation.

Compare memory use and latency under a representative workload. Test the new endpoint with the intended domain before changing DNS. DNS is not an instant rollback mechanism: caches remain until expiry, and existing connections may stay open. Both sides must tolerate the transition.

Move databases, scheduled tasks and background consumers with a separate plan. Two active cron copies can send two reports, and a DNS change does not synchronize data. Decide the source of truth and when the old consumer stops.

Keep container images, explicit startup commands and database migrations in your own repository, together with restore instructions. That reduces the cost of moving back to a VPS. A trial with one real service provides more useful evidence than comparing abstract feature lists.