VPS Pricing Guides

The advertised monthly instance price is only one part of a VPS bill. Public IPv4 addresses, outbound traffic, backups, snapshots, attached storage, load balancers and taxes can change which provider is actually cheaper.

These guides use official pricing pages and documentation as primary sources. Each guide records its review date and separates confirmed prices from costs that depend on region or checkout choices.

Compare Providers

Provider	Useful starting point	Billing model	Main cost to check	Full guide
DigitalOcean	Basic Droplets from $4/month	Per-second billing up to a monthly cap	Backups, snapshots and outbound overage	DigitalOcean pricing
Vultr	Small cloud compute plans from $2.50/month in limited configurations	Hourly billing up to a monthly cap	Region availability, IPv4 and backups	Vultr pricing
Akamai Cloud / Linode	Shared CPU Nanode from $5/month	Hourly billing up to a monthly cap	Egress, backups and powered-off instances	Linode pricing
AWS Lightsail	Linux bundles from $3.50/month for IPv6-only or $5 with public IPv4	Hourly billing up to a monthly cap	IP type, regional transfer allowance and snapshots	AWS Lightsail pricing
Hetzner Cloud	Shared and dedicated-vCPU plan families	Hourly billing with a monthly maximum	Location, currency, VAT, IPv4, volumes and traffic	Hetzner Cloud pricing
Contabo	Large storage and RAM allocations at budget prices	Monthly plans	Setup terms, region and add-ons	Contabo pricing

Prices above are a starting snapshot, not a quote. Verify the provider's official calculator or checkout before creating a server.

How We Compare VPS Pricing

1. Match The Workload First

A 512 MB instance may run a small DNS service or test environment, but it is not equivalent to a 1 GB or 2 GB production server. Compare plans with enough memory, CPU and storage for the same workload.

2. Calculate The Complete Monthly Bill

Use this simple estimate:

instance + public IP + backups + storage + expected egress + load balancer + tax

The cheapest base instance can lose its price advantage after required add-ons. Conversely, a bundle with transfer and a public IP included may be cheaper for a predictable small website.

3. Check What Stops Billing

Stopping or powering off a virtual server usually does not release its reserved resources. Most providers continue billing until the instance is deleted. Snapshots, volumes and reserved IP addresses may also remain chargeable after deletion.

4. Compare The Correct Region

Plan availability, transfer allowances, tax and currency can differ by region. Compare the region where the server will actually run, then test latency from your users before migrating production traffic.

Which Guide Should You Read?

• Choose DigitalOcean when developer experience and predictable add-ons matter.
• Choose Vultr when you need many locations or very small compute options.
• Choose Linode when pooled transfer and straightforward shared CPU plans fit the workload.
• Choose AWS Lightsail when you want a simpler AWS bundle and may later use other AWS services.
• Choose Hetzner Cloud when price-to-resource value matters and its available locations fit your audience.

For broader shortlists, see VPS under $5, 1 dollar VPS alternatives and the VPS provider reviews.