How to stress test a VPS with stress-ng, htop, and iostat before committing to a plan

How to stress test a VPS with stress-ng, htop, and iostat before committing to a plan

https://www.makeuseof.com/i-stress-test-new-virtual-private-servers-with-these-tools-before-wasting-money/

Publish Date: 2026-05-27 09:00:00

Source Domain: www.makeuseof.com

I spun up a new cheap virtual private server (VPS) for a web app project that, on paper, looked perfectly fine for my needs. Unfortunately, it fell short of the promised specs once I started putting pressure on it. That’s because a VPS, unlike a dedicated server, has shared resources that sometimes don’t live up to what the provider promised on the order spec sheet.

The CPU, disk, memory, and network are all sitting on infrastructure shared between you and whoever else has a guest VPS sitting on the physical host. If your host machine has inadequate hardware partitioning, your experience will be poor once other users ramp up their resource use.

So, before committing to a provider, I perform a short stress test on the VPS first with some free Linux tools, before I waste any time building on it.

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I start by checking what the VPS actually gave me
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