[interstice]

I've never found cloud anything to beat the speed (and price) of a well placed server.

DO has always been a bit rich for my blood though, and even a low cost hetzner VPS has less cores than I remember seeing at the same price a decade ago. I could be wrong there though I usually use Vultr for their SYD region.

[petcat]

> has less cores than I remember seeing at the same price a decade ago

Less cores but probably 5x more performance per core now.

[interstice]

This is more helpful when software doesn't just pin the first 4 available cores at 100% to get things done.

[SpaceNugget]

How? If each core is 5x faster then it's done 5x sooner. I can't think of a use case for a cheap vps where 5x faster per core cpus are not helpful.

[interstice]

A slower background transcode usually doesn't matter, but a faster transcode that stops important processes running in the meantime might. This is usually fixable with effort, but sometimes it's nice to not have to configure everything to the nth degree.

[SpaceNugget]

I don't really buy it. The idea that somehow getting one less core but faster per core speeds per pricing bracket makes any difference in this imagined problem.

There are many different configurations of vps available with different numbers of cores, if you are picking the vps configuration specifically to have more cores than some transcoding software uses by default to avoid configuring a thread limit for that software then you are still configuring things to the nth degree just at the objectively wrong level of abstraction.

[interstice]

You don't have to buy anything, however I ran into this exact issue two days ago. YMMV