Cobaltfell FAQ: dedicated vCPU VPS, paid in crypto

A thread. A vCPU is one hardware thread of the host processor. Yours are pinned one to one to your VPS and never lent to another customer, and the two threads of a physical core stay together, so every 2 vCPU make one whole core that no neighbour shares. Counted in physical cores, Fell 2 is one core, Fell 4 is two, Fell 8 is four and Fell 16 is eight. The arithmetic is in is a dedicated vCPU a core or a thread.

As many as the jobs that have to run at the same moment. An app served by a single process spends most of its time on one vCPU, while a parallel build (make -j) or a pool of workers can keep every vCPU you give it busy. To size from a server you already run, compare its load average (uptime) with its vCPU count (nproc) at your busiest hour: a load that stays above that count means tasks are waiting their turn. RAM grows with the plan, at 2 GB per vCPU. The pricing page matches common workloads to the four plans.

Yes. Full load is allowed for as long as your work needs it: no CPU credits, no burst window and no throttling after some minutes at 100%. Compilers, encoders, databases and inference jobs are all fine at full load; the one exception is mining, covered in the next group of questions.

Steal time is the share of time a vCPU was ready to work while the hypervisor was busy serving another virtual machine. Linux shows it as st on the %Cpu(s) line of top, as %steal for each vCPU in mpstat -P ALL 5 (package sysstat) and as the st column of vmstat 5. Read it during your heaviest hour, not while the server idles. On a dedicated vCPU, steal time should sit at or near zero. We will publish the figure we measure on our own machines, with its date, and never an estimate. The full guide: what CPU steal time is and how to check it.

Not published yet. Our own YABS and Geekbench 6 results, together with the steal time we measure, will be published with their date once our first test machine is delivered. Until then we quote no performance figure of our own. YABS and Geekbench 6 run on any Linux VPS, so nothing stops you from measuring your own plan the day you receive it: see how to benchmark a VPS with YABS or Geekbench 6.

Every plan runs on AMD EPYC 9004/9005 server processors (Zen 4 / Zen 5), a family first launched in November 2022; a VPS is never moved to an older node without telling you first. After your first login, lscpu | grep 'Model name' prints the exact model that the host exposes to your VPS.

No. Mining any cryptocurrency is not allowed, on any plan and with any software. Your own heavy CPU work, such as builds, encoding, inference or databases, may run at full load, and a node that only validates a blockchain is not mining. Every banned use is listed in the acceptable use policy.

For most self-hosted n8n setups, yes. n8n is a Node.js application, and in its default mode one main process runs the editor, the triggers and the workflow executions. Its documentation names the Code node, large JSON or binary data and many executions at once as what pushes memory up, so watch RAM before CPU. When workflows with heavy code nodes start to pile up, queue mode hands executions to separate workers, each its own Node.js process; that is the point where Fell 8 or more vCPU earn their price.

Yes: a node that downloads, validates and relays blocks is not mining. Size it from the requirements the chain's own project publishes. For Bitcoin Core, bitcoin.org lists 2 GB of RAM and about 7 GB of free disk with pruning switched on, against roughly 750 GB for the whole chain (checked 2 November 2026). A pruned node therefore fits Fell 2, while an unpruned copy outgrows even the 640 GB NVMe of Fell 16.

No. Linux images only: Debian, Ubuntu, AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. Windows is not offered. The images offered at checkout are Debian 13, Debian 12, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, AlmaLinux 10, Rocky Linux 10.

Not for direct delivery to other servers. Outbound port 25 is blocked on every VPS and is not opened on request; ports 465 and 587 towards a mail provider stay open. An application that sends through an outside mail provider on port 587 or 465 works as usual.

BTC, USDT, USDC, ETH, SOL, LTC, XMR. USDT travels on Tron (TRC-20) or Ethereum (ERC-20), USDC on Ethereum (ERC-20), Monero on its own network, and Bitcoin is paid on-chain. Each payment tops up a prepaid balance, at least $1 at a time, and your orders are paid from that balance.

Monero, yes; Lightning, no. A Monero top-up goes to our Monero address for the exact amount shown, as with any other coin, and is credited after 10 confirmations, about 20 minutes. A public explorer reveals neither the sender nor the amount of that payment, though our billing still ties your account to its orders, the IP addresses of its VPS and the TXID you declare. Bitcoin is taken on-chain only.

No. No KYC at any point: no ID, no selfie, no documents, no card and no phone number. As for signing in: An account number is the only login you need, and an email address stays optional. How paying without documents works, and which other hosts allow it, is on dedicated CPU VPS with crypto.

Keep your account number safe, because it is the only key to your account. Add an email and a lost number can be sent back to you; with no email, nobody can restore it. A password manager is the safest home for the number, and an email added in the dashboard is your only way back if it goes missing. The contact page explains what support can and cannot do.

In days of service, yes; in cash, only in narrow cases. When a VPS cannot be built, or stops and support cannot bring it back, every day it was out of service returns to your balance. The balance never expires. Top-ups are not cashed out unless a law requires it, except the part paid only to reach the minimum top-up, which comes back on request in USDT or USDC within 30 days of payment if it is still unspent. The refund policy walks through each case with figures.

Delivery takes 1 hour at most after your payment is confirmed; most VPS are ready within a few minutes. A member of the team builds each VPS by hand once the payment is confirmed, a job of minutes rather than seconds: the dashboard shows the progress, then the IP address once the VPS boots. Your term starts on the day the VPS is ready, so the build hours are not counted against it.

No. Root over SSH. Paste a public key at checkout and password login stays off; leave the field empty and the team sets a temporary root password, shown in your dashboard, that you replace at first login. A key remains the safer way in: create one with ssh-keygen -t ed25519 and paste the contents of the .pub file. The steps are shown on how we work.

Amsterdam (Netherlands), Zurich (Switzerland) and Bucharest (Romania): all four plans in all three cities, at one price. You pick the city at checkout; choose the one closest to your users or to the services your VPS talks to most.

Rent a VPS for 1 month, 3 months (10% off), 6 months (20% off) or 12 months (30% off) at a time. A longer term costs the monthly price times its months, minus its discount, rounded down to the cent: Fell 8 is $54.63 for 1 month, $147.50 for 3, $262.22 for 6 and $458.89 for 12. A renewal repeats the term of your order at the same price, unless you choose a different term for the next one in your dashboard. Each VPS is paid from a prepaid crypto balance for the term chosen at checkout: 1, 3, 6 or 12 months. With auto-renew on, the same term is taken from the balance again at the price of your order, unless you set a different term for the next renewal in the dashboard; if the balance falls short, the VPS stops when its term ends, its disk is held for 7 days and then erased.

No. Backups are not part of any plan: keep a copy of your data somewhere else. Tools such as restic or BorgBackup can copy your data to storage you control. Make that copy before asking for a reinstall, which erases the disk.

Only by what the datacenter filters for every customer. No DDoS mitigation is sold or promised beyond the default filtering of the datacenter network. If your service tends to draw attacks, place a filtering proxy or a scrubbing service in front of it.