What actually decides it
Location. Every thousand kilometres is delay that nothing removes. A machine near you is almost always faster than a powerful machine on another continent, and the difference in responsiveness is measured in multiples, not percentages.
Channel width and the traffic allowance. Providers write "up to 1 Gbit/s", but the second number matters more — how much traffic the plan includes and what happens once it is used up. Sometimes the speed is cut to a level at which the server cannot be used at all.
The processor — but not by core count. A tunnel almost always rests on a single core, so frequency and generation matter, not quantity. Two fast cores beat eight slow ones.
Memory hardly matters. A tunnel server is content with whatever comes in the cheapest plan at any provider.
What to test before moving everything
- Latency to the machine from your home connection and from mobile — they differ often enough to change the decision.
- Real speed rather than the advertised one. Measure before and after raising the tunnel: the difference between those two numbers is the price of the transport.
- Behaviour under load. Downloading a large file for several minutes shows whether the provider throttles long sessions.
- Whether UDP works. Test this without fail if you plan on AmneziaWG: some providers and some home operators restrict UDP.
- How long the machine survives an unpaid invoice and how quickly support answers. One email settles it before you pay for a year.
What not to do
- Do not take the cheapest annual plan without testing the machine. The annual discount pays off once; a poor machine gets in the way every day.
- Do not chase exotic locations. The rarer the direction, the more often the route to it is long and congested.
- Do not leave password access on the server. Keys, and only keys; this is the one security setting that is not optional.
- Do not keep a single server if you depend on it. A second one, however cheap, assigned as the backup, removes a whole class of problems.
How this connects to the client
Stealtify can check a server before connecting and switch to the backup if the main one is unavailable or answers too slowly. That is the practical reason to keep a second machine: the switch happens on its own.
Raising a server and getting a link is a separate subject, covered in the documentation under "Your own server". The same part lists what to install on the machine once you have chosen it.