when does it make sense to move from vps to dedicated server?

Running a site that's hitting CPU limits on a 4GB VPS. Getting about 50k visitors/day and the database queries are backing up.

The question is: do I scale up to a larger VPS (8GB, 4 cores) or make the jump to a dedicated server?

Dedicated is 3x the cost but I get the resources to myself. VPS is shared but I can scale incrementally.

The bottleneck you're describing sounds like database optimization, not resource constraints.

Before throwing hardware at the problem, check:

1. Query optimization — are you missing indexes?
2. Caching — are you hitting the database for data that doesn't change?
3. Connection pooling — are you opening too many connections?

Hardware scaling is the wrong tool for a software problem.

If you've already optimized and still need more resources:

Traffic	VPS (4GB)	VPS (8GB)	Dedicated
10k/day	Fine	Overkill	Overkill
50k/day	Struggling	Fine	Overkill
100k/day	No	Struggling	Fine

At 50k/day, an 8GB VPS should be sufficient if your stack is efficient.

optimize before you scale