You're getting 2 (or X) virtual cores - which means absolutely nothing and can vary from minute to mintue / hour to hour - Linode was even giving 8 virtual cores with the cheapest plan 2/3 years ago. Virtual cores on Linode/DO/Vultr are shared/contended, basically undefined in terms of lower bound performance - you are at the mercy of other tenants - and there's a lot more tenants in the building too (where number of tenants is exponentially more than physical cores), so I maintain if your CPU bound and horizontal scaling these are poor choices. The cost of provisioning high performance networking is very real, Linode/DO/Vultr don't expect 98% of their customers to use anything close to 1TB and this nicely fit with the idea that they are poor choice for horizontal scaling - hence why AWS Lightsail isn't a threat to main cloud offerings. If you're just getting start and no where near the limit of single node then fine, I even use Linode for a few clients myself "Bandwidth: 39GB Used, 13961GB Remaining, 14000GB Quota ".