Start with your workload. A database-heavy application should make storage latency and random I/O a priority. A small website may care more about overall server resources and reliability. A development server that constantly installs packages and builds applications may benefit from faster storage, while a lightweight application with little disk activity may see very little change. Also look beyond the storage badge. Ask whether the provider explains its virtualization setup, storage limits, backups, network capacity and resource allocation. Better still, test the VPS after deployment with a tool such as fio and compare the results against what your workload actually needs. That tells you far more than a marketing claim saying “up to X times faster.