The cheap VPS's absolutely do not allow you to pin the CPU to 100% usage for a significant amount of time since that messes up the provisioning. A Minecraft server will definitely pin the CPU to 100%.
What happens is that your process will be killed repeatedly.
A $5 VPS is great for simple site hosting and a small amount of CPU workload. They do not work at all for any type of game server.
>As long as you don’t go to 100% CPU usage for a long period of time, everything will be okay. DigitalOcean are doing pro active monitoring and will see if your droplet is having 100% CPU usage all the time and may limit the CPU capacity of the droplets displaying this behavior. Since each droplet shares physical hardware with other droplets, constant 100% CPU use degrades the service quality for other users on the same node.
Note that a game server will go to 100%. It will be killed.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/cpu-usage-l...