There's always going to be some time associated with creating a VPS. You're not going to get a new VPS instance allocated in seconds simply due to these practic

There's always going to be some time associated with creating a VPS. You're not going to get a new VPS instance allocated in seconds simply due to these practical issues. For this reason you may need to keep some idle servers running if you really need a high level of responsiveness. It sounds like your real issue is cost. Perhaps two options you might consider: buy (don't rent) your own hardware and get some colo space nearby. It can work out significantly cheaper and neither the hardware or rackspace has to be expensive. The second option to minimize costs would be to rewrite the key parts of your algorithms in something like C, if you haven't already. If you're doing the heavy lifting in something like Ruby, or even Java, you're going to be wasting a lot of resources in a situation where it sounds like every cycle counts. Hope this helps.