Bandwidth decides it, not CPU
WireGuard encrypts in the kernel and is extremely cheap per packet. A single modern vCPU will saturate a gigabit link before the CPU becomes the limit. OpenVPN is heavier and older, but still not heavy enough for plan size to be the deciding factor on a personal VPN.
What you actually spend is traffic, and all of it counts twice in a sense: every byte you pull through the tunnel is a byte in and a byte out of the server.
Rough shape of a month, per person:
- Browsing, messaging, email: a few gigabytes.
- Music streaming most days: tens of gigabytes.
- Video streaming in HD: hundreds of gigabytes, and this is the only number that matters.
If you plan to route video through your VPN, size the plan by its included traffic and ignore everything else. If you plan to route a phone and a laptop doing ordinary things, the smallest plan is genuinely enough.
Our included traffic, for reference:
| Plan | RAM | Included traffic |
|---|---|---|
| Micro | 1 GB | 500 GB |
| Starter | 2 GB | 2 TB |
| Standard | 4 GB | 3 TB |
A personal WireGuard endpoint on Micro is not a compromise. It is the right answer, right up until the month you start watching films through it.
Region matters more than the specification
Your VPN's job is to be somewhere, and the somewhere is the product.
- For privacy from your local network, any region works; pick the closest one so latency stays invisible.
- For reaching services that behave differently by country, the region is the entire point, and nothing else about the server matters.
- For a laggy connection, distance is almost always the cause. A VPN adds a detour: your traffic goes to the server first, then onward. A server on another continent doubles that detour.
If you are unsure, deploy the nearest one and test. On hourly billing, trying three regions in an evening costs less than a coffee, and the answer is specific to your connection rather than to a review.
WireGuard, OpenVPN, or something managed
- WireGuard is the default answer in 2026: small, fast, quiet, and it reconnects instantly when your phone changes networks. Setup is a config file and a key pair.
- OpenVPN is worth it only when you need to blend into ordinary HTTPS traffic on a hostile network, which is a real but narrow case.
- Headscale — a self-hosted control plane for Tailscale clients — is the right pick when you want a mesh between your own devices rather than a single exit point. Different problem, different tool.
What actually goes wrong
Not performance. The two things that break personal VPNs:
- The server is forgotten and unpatched. It has an open port on the public internet by definition. Set it to update itself, or plan to touch it monthly.
- The traffic allowance runs out mid-month. You find out when everything slows or stops. Watch it for the first month — after that you will know your own number.
What we would pick
For one or two people, a phone and a laptop, no video: Micro, nearest region, WireGuard. $10 a month, and the traffic allowance is the only thing you might outgrow.
For a household, or anything that streams: Starter, for the 2 TB rather than the extra gigabyte of RAM.
Above that, for a VPN alone, you are buying capacity you will not use. Spend it on a second server somewhere else instead — two endpoints in two countries is more useful than one larger one.
Signing up takes an email address and a crypto top-up: no card, no identity check. Deployment is about a minute, and billing stops the hour you destroy the server.