My bitcoin node mostly had a dedicated connection to itself. I did not have a "soft cap": only a $5/GB penalty if I went over 300GB/month.
For VPS, the bandwidth is not the problem: your data center probably allows several providers to peer with each other: making your access cheaper. The problem with a VPS is that you will be asked to upgrade to a dedicated server if you use too much CPU time. How much CPU time does it take to verify a 20MB block?
About 6 minutes, 40 seconds."
CPU usage should go down by a factor of about eight in the next release when we switch to Pieter's libsecp256k1 library for validating transactions. "
Additionally, the article you cite doesn't even give any details of the specs of the machine so it is impossible for me to draw any conclusions.
It is worth noting that btcec, our elliptic curve math package, is optimized and faster than OpenSSL when performing operations over secp256k1.
You were not the only one to wonder about specs. I think you can probably assume "Semi-modern Intel CPU with ~4 cores at ~3Ghz".
What were the specs of the machine that capped out at 6 32MB blocks per hour?