This is aimed at the providers, after my own recent experience.
I purchased (year paid) a large LEB, with three CPU's as I have a bit of initial processing required, before things settled down. I made my script single threaded to lock it to one core, knowing that the SQL backend is likely to tie up the second core. I run the script, things are working well, and my usage is shown as ~2.02. I figured this would be OK, as it is only using ~66% of the processing power I have purchased.
About 12 hours later, I find my VPS is powered off. Zero warning, nor any sort of notification about the action taken.
Before I talk to my provider about it, I'm curious to see what the general consensus is. Do you look at the individual core usage, or the average of the purchased capacity? Do you warn or notify the customer? If I rerun my script with a nice -n 19, would that be preferred?