vCPU can mean entirely different things between providers, which sometimes makes it hard to compare prices.
In general, we treat "vCPU" as a single hardware threads, which is pretty common. Our hosts use Epyc CPUs with two threads each, which is also pretty common.
So a single CPU dedicated VM on Fly is equivalent to owning a hardware thread, which makes $31/mo comparable to other places. These are roughly the same as DigitalOcean's "general purpose" droplets.
Basic Droplets, and most Vultr VMs, use shared CPUs.
Providers use wildly different CPUs too. You'll sometimes find people surprised how fast Fly VMs are because we standardized on Epyc CPUs pretty early. Much of what you can buy runs on either older Intel or consumer grade processors. Which is actually fine! The people who buy our dedicated CPU VMs just so happen to need a lot of power because they're frequently transcoding or generating images.
I took a closer look, and indeed, it's almost the same as DigitalOcean. The 2 CPU plans under basic confused me, and I forgot that the whole section was Shared CPU.
Indeed. Still, I think these shared CPU thread VPSes work pretty well up until a certain point, and it's probably true of a fly.io shared CPU thread MicroVM. It's good to be aware of the options and to switch. I would recommend using OCI containers with VPSes, so you can easily switch between plans and providers.
In general, we treat "vCPU" as a single hardware threads, which is pretty common. Our hosts use Epyc CPUs with two threads each, which is also pretty common.
So a single CPU dedicated VM on Fly is equivalent to owning a hardware thread, which makes $31/mo comparable to other places. These are roughly the same as DigitalOcean's "general purpose" droplets.
Basic Droplets, and most Vultr VMs, use shared CPUs.
Providers use wildly different CPUs too. You'll sometimes find people surprised how fast Fly VMs are because we standardized on Epyc CPUs pretty early. Much of what you can buy runs on either older Intel or consumer grade processors. Which is actually fine! The people who buy our dedicated CPU VMs just so happen to need a lot of power because they're frequently transcoding or generating images.