Hosting local LLM inference privately: what a CPU VPS can and can't do

Let's be honest up front: if you want fast, cheap, high-quality generation, call an API. A CPU VPS will not beat a datacenter full of GPUs, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. So why self-host inference at all? One reason, and it's a good one: the model on your server never sends your prompts anywhere. What CPU inference actually looks like You can run real models on CPU with enough RAM. A 7–8B model quantized to 4-bit works. A 13B works. You can even push a 30B-class model…