It's really cheap. Although 60% CPU steal (means you get 40% of CPU computing power ?) and very few online discussion about serverica is somewhat concerning. As for about "Dedicated Core", lowendtalk website claim it only applies to VDS (not VPS) while serverica website claim it also applies to their VPS.
I also suspect to not get 8 full cores, but half or maybe even quarter cores. They're quite a lot slower than my (older) Xeon server, while these are AMD EPYC 7551P cores.
The CPU steal was kinda expected, at least they're not suspending me. I used to process all my Trust updates a lot faster, now it takes over a day. But that's okay, as there are 6 more days left in the week and I'm not in a rush (for this).
My Merit update also takes longer, it used to finish on Sunday, but it's still running. It only uses one core, and the CPU steal ended. So if hammering the CPU for many hours in a row leads to 60% steal, I can live with that.
I've been screwed by disappearing servers in the past. In this case, I could have paid per month to reduce the risk, but took the risk out of convenience.