Oh I see! Fly Machines are lower level than what most people use us for. They're designed for people building platforms.

Most people run "apps" on Fly. You control which regions they run in, we load balance to the nearest. We have guides for launching some frameworks here: https://fly.io/docs/getting-started/

The difference between us and a VPS provider is: your app runs in as many of those regions as you want. So does your database, if you're using our Postgres. And we route writes to the appropriate place: https://fly.io/blog/globally-distributed-postgres/

The other difference is probably CPU. The 4 cpu, 8GB RAM instances are 2 dedicated AMD EPYC cores + hyper threads. They're relatively expensive. You may not need them! VPS providers typically run cheaper CPUs and over provision them.

We're shipping shared CPU options with more memory soon. They should be closer to what you see from VPS providers, though still more expensive.