if you are buying your own hardware, you should consider it when you need 8GiB ram or spend more than $100/month, and absolutely jump when you need 32GiB ram or

if you are buying your own hardware, you should consider it when you need 8GiB ram or spend more than $100/month, and absolutely jump when you need 32GiB ram or spend more than $500/month. (note, this changes if you only need the server for a month or two) The thing is, hosting a small server is probably going to cost you around $100/month anyhow, so if you can get by with a vps that costs less than that, do so. A small server with a core2duo and 8GiB ram is maybe $500 in parts. Considering that it'll last for at least three years, that's not much, if you think you'll have a server for a while. If you are renting your dedicated server, then obviously, money doesn't matter to you, or you are planning on only keeping the server for a month or two, and you shouldn't listen to me, because I don't know what that is like.