API jobs and browser jobs are different problems
For raw HTTP or API pulls on a modest concurrency, a $15–$20 VPS is fine, especially while the parser is still changing or the project has uncertain longevity. The VPS vs dedicated question only matters once the job has browsers, queues, and retries, because that combination can drain proxy bandwidth without any obvious signal in alerts.
The useful comparison is not one provider name against another. It is: do queue age, retry count, and billed proxy bytes stay flat under a real sustained load, or do they move while the target's behavior stays the same?
Queue age and retry counts point at the host, not the proxy
One common pattern: 24 Playwright workers on a shared VPS, queue age starting under a minute and later sitting around 18 minutes, Chrome restarting 138 times, retries at roughly 2,700, and proxy bandwidth finishing just past 8 GB on a run that normally uses 2–3 GB. The scraper dashboard averaged the restarts into slow-but-alive rather than broken.
Before buying more proxy bandwidth, check the worker host. top or pidstat for CPU steal, iostat for disk wait, container restart counts, and queue age over time. On a shared VPS those numbers can shift because another tenant on the same physical machine got busy. That is not a defect in VPS design — it is the tradeoff of shared hardware.
Shared resources are harmless for light work. A few slow raw HTTP requests barely show up. Slow browser starts, cookie loss after Chrome crashes, and retry queues that grow faster than they drain are different. At that point the proxy pool looks guilty even when the host is the noisy variable.
Dedicated hardware removes one variable, not all of them
Dedicated hardware does not fix bad pacing, blocked targets, broken selectors, or cookie handling. It removes CPU scheduling and disk I/O contention from unrelated tenants. For a 40- or 50-worker browser run, that matters because queue growth becomes attributable: if it still grows on dedicated iron, the problem is the app, the target, or the proxy route — not the box.
Proxynade's Ryzen 7640HS bare-metal server is listed at $59.99/month and the Ryzen 7H at $69.99/month, billed monthly, quarterly, or semi-annually. A quiet five-worker API job stays on the VPS. A browser workload that already failed once — producing a rerun, extra proxy bandwidth, and debugging time — does not.
The scraper dashboard hides the failure mode
Most scraper apps surface completed URLs, saved rows, and average request time. They bury browser restarts, queue waits, retry loops, and proxy bytes spent on pages that will be retried. This is why a cheap VPS can look fine in the app while the proxy meter shows twice the expected bandwidth.
A five-minute benchmark proves little. Run the real workload long enough for memory to fill, queues to back up, and the host to hit a busy period. Track CPU steal, disk wait, container restarts, queue age, retry count, and proxy bytes together. If those numbers stay flat, keep the VPS. If they move while traffic volume holds steady, removing host contention is cheaper than re-running the same scrape repeatedly.
The Proxynade dashboard network logs show host, outcome, latency, and byte totals per request. Usage logs export as CSV. Cross-referencing those numbers against the scraper's completed-rows count is the fastest way to find whether retried proxy bytes are coming from the worker host or from the target.