Bare Metal vs Virtualized VPS in Romania

KVM hypervisor overhead is well-understood: approximately 3-7% CPU overhead for compute-bound workloads, minimal for I/O workloads with virtio drivers (VirtIO NVMe, VirtIO-net). For standard web applications, databases, and network services, this overhead is imperceptible. For CPU-bound compute (intensive video encoding, large-scale machine learning inference, cryptographic operations at very high volume), bare metal eliminates this overhead and can provide 5-10% better throughput.

KVM VPS: hardware-level virtualization with separate kernel and memory namespace per VM. Co-tenants cannot access each other's memory. Historical Spectre/Meltdown side-channel attacks could theoretically leak information across VMs on the same physical host - mitigated in modern kernels. Bare metal: no co-tenants at all. No side-channel risk from other VMs. For sensitive applications with serious threat models, bare metal eliminates the co-tenant risk entirely.