With regards VPS processing, it wont be continuos, but in requests. A request comes in, some signatures need to be made or verified, a reply is made, done. That work well enough on the vps? Also, can I have 2 cores?
That would work fine with the VPS, I believe. I can't give you a specific number of cores but I could give you core affinity, disallowing others from using those cores. But in the end I believe the best thing would be to just allow you to fully take advantage of the 4 core system (minus the VM penalty) when needed. This all boils down to not allowing other VPSs on the same machine to hog the system, which should be a simple case of giving your kvm process a better niceness value.
The multi core performance of KVM is not completely linear, though, and the only way to go about this is by doing real tests. If I provide you with a VPS instance are you equipped to run performance tests?
Nope, not for a while. At this point in time we would be working on basic functionality. Performance issues due to traffic would be a great problem for us to have. I'm just trying to find out what my options would be if we did have to scale up.
To give you an idea of what you'd be up against competition wise, the alternative kalyhost has is their power option vps (although we may possibly go for the medium option) https://www.kalyhost.com/vps.html
Yeah, I can beat kalyhost in both price and performance, although I'm pretty sure you will not need the power option, as you hint.