Can You Run AI & LLM Inference on Contabo CPU VPS? (Ollama & Llama 3 Performance Test)

The High Cost of GPU Cloud Instances

Dedicated cloud GPU instances (like NVIDIA A100 or H100 on AWS) cost between $2.00 and $4.50 per hour—demanding over $1,500 every single month. For background tasks like document summarization, semantic embeddings, and automated categorization, paying GPU prices is unnecessary. Thanks to quantized models (GGUF format), modern Large Language Models can run entirely in CPU system memory.

Performance Benchmark: Llama 3.1 8B on Contabo Cloud VPS 3 (8 vCPU / 30GB RAM)

# Install Ollama
curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh

# Run quantized Llama 3.1 model
ollama run llama3.1:8b-instruct-q4_K_M

Our benchmarks recorded an average generation speed of 6.8 tokens per second on Contabo's AMD EPYC cores. While not fast enough for real-time human chat, it is more than fast enough for background asynchronous batch processing, automated ticket analysis, and email drafting.