The Cheapest VPS for Developers in 2026: Price per GB of RAM, After the Price Rises

The cheapest useful VPS in 2026, 4 GB of RAM and two cores, costs $4.54 a month at OVHcloud in the US on a 12-month term, or €3.81 before VAT in Europe. Next come Netcup's VPS Lite 1 at €5.86 incl. VAT and Hetzner's CX23 at about $7, both in Europe only. The same 4 GB costs $24 at DigitalOcean and Akamai (Linode). That's a 5x spread for the same amount of RAM. It comes from contract terms, regions and how much CPU you really get, and none of the "best cheap VPS" lists rank on any of those.

Prices checked 2026-10-01 on each provider's own pricing pages and public price APIs, linked in the tables. Prices are in USD before tax unless marked. Netcup prices include 19% German VAT. Euro prices are converted at about $1.13.

I've paid the other way: about $600 for my first month on Laravel Cloud, then $500+ a month on Railway. Today one €80 dedicated server runs everything I have. So I think a rented server is the cheapest way to run an app. Here's what each provider charges for that server now, after a year of price rises.

What would a VPS cost for your app?

Pick the RAM your apps and databases need, where your users are, and how much traffic you send. Each row is the cheapest plan from that provider that fits, including traffic overage where there is one.

Slide the region to US with 4 GB and Hetzner goes from $7 to $38, the most expensive row. Push traffic to 8 TB and the three big clouds start adding overage, while OVHcloud, Netcup and IONOS don't meter traffic at all.

What is the cheapest VPS in 2026?

By price per GB of RAM, OVHcloud's VPS-1 is the cheapest paid VPS: 2 vCores, 4 GB and 40 GB NVMe for $4.54 a month in the US or €3.81 before VAT in Europe, both on a 12-month term. That's about $1.10 per GB. Netcup's VPS Lite 1 and Hetzner's CX23 follow at about $1.70 per GB, in Europe only. DigitalOcean, Vultr and Linode sit at $5 to $6 per GB.

The cheapest useful plan from each provider, sorted by what you pay per GB of RAM once any intro discount ends:

At 4 GB, Vultr is $20, DigitalOcean and Linode are $24, and Hetzner's US CPX21 is $37.49. Per GB that doesn't change: the big three charge the same rate at every size.

Contabo is missing on purpose. Its pricing pages returned a security-check page instead of prices every time I tried to load them, and I won't copy its prices from a reseller's site. Check contabo.com yourself if you want it in the comparison.

Which cheap VPS should a developer pick?

For most developers I'd pick Netcup's VPS 500 or Hetzner's CX23 in Europe, and Netcup's VPS 500 in Manassas or OVHcloud's VPS-1 in the US. OVHcloud is the cheapest per GB on paper. Hetzner is the only one of the cheap four with hourly billing and no contract. Netcup gives more disk than either and lets you pick a US or European datacenter.

My picks, and why:

• Cheapest in Europe: OVHcloud VPS-1 at €3.81 a month before VAT on a 12-month term (€4.49 month to month). The catch is the 500 Mbps port and 40 GB of disk.
• Cheapest in Europe with no contract: Hetzner CX23, about $7 a month billed by the hour, with 20 TB of traffic. Delete it after a week and you pay for a week. The CPU is the slowest in the benchmark table below.
• Best value in Europe for a long-lived app: Netcup VPS 500 at €8.26 incl. VAT, with 64 GB of disk and a 2.5 Gbit/s port. If you're outside the EU, Netcup's own country selector shows 0% VAT for the US, so you'd pay about €6.94.
• Cheapest in the US: OVHcloud VPS-1 at $4.54 (12 months) or $5.35 (monthly), in Virginia or Oregon. Netcup's VPS 500 in Manassas costs about €9.30 incl. VAT with more disk. For hourly billing, Vultr's 2 GB plan is $10.
• Most RAM per dollar: Oracle's Always Free tier gives you 12 GB of Arm RAM for $0, with catches. Among paid plans, OVHcloud's VPS-4 has 24 GB for $23.37 in the US on a 12-month term, about $0.97 per GB.

My full Hetzner breakdown, including every CX, CAX, CPX and CCX price, is in Hetzner pricing.

What is the cheapest VPS in the US?

OVHcloud's VPS-1: 2 vCores and 4 GB for $4.54 a month on a 12-month term or $5.35 month to month, in Virginia or Oregon, with unlimited traffic at 500 Mbps. Netcup's VPS 500 in Manassas is about €9.30 incl. VAT. Hetzner is no longer a cheap US option: its US servers cost more than DigitalOcean's at every size since June 2026.

Hetzner raised prices twice in 2026: on 1 April by about a third, existing servers included, and again for new orders from 15 June. The CX line that makes Hetzner cheap only runs in Germany and Finland. In Ashburn and Hillsboro you get CPX, where 4 GB is $37.49 against $24 at DigitalOcean. I compared the two in detail in Hetzner vs DigitalOcean.

Netcup, the other cheap European name, also raised prices three times in 2026 (March, May and September). The figures here are after all three. The VPS Lite plans are Europe only. For a US server, Netcup's regular VPS line lets you pick Manassas for about €1 more a month on the VPS 500.

Netcup vs Hetzner: which is the better cheap VPS?

At 4 GB they cost about the same once you compare like with like. Netcup's VPS 500 is €8.26 incl. VAT, which is €6.94 (about $7.84) before VAT, against $7.09 for Hetzner's CX23 with its IPv4 address. Netcup gives you more disk, a US datacenter and traffic that's only throttled, never billed. Hetzner gives you hourly billing with no contract, and it has the independent benchmark below; Netcup has none yet.

When people search "netcup vps" they find two lines. The regular VPS plans above take a 12-month term and let you pick a datacenter. VPS Lite is cheaper (the Lite 1 is €5.86 incl. VAT for the same 4 GB) on a 6-month term, Europe only, with tighter throttling (Lite plans).

How I'd choose: Netcup for a long-lived app you'll run for a year, or any app whose users are in the US. Hetzner for servers you create and delete often, for tests and short projects, or when you want 8 GB for less. At 8 GB Hetzner pulls ahead: $10.59 against €14.50 incl. VAT. Both raised prices more than once in 2026, so check the plan pages on the day you order.

Is there a $5 VPS anymore?

Yes, but at 1 GB, not 4. Vultr's 1 GB plan and Akamai's Nanode are $5 a month, and DigitalOcean's 1 GiB Droplet is $6 (its 512 MiB Droplet is $4). The best $5 deal is OVHcloud's VPS-1: 4 GB for $5.35 month to month in the US. Hetzner's cheapest server, which was the classic $5 box, is now about $7.

The phrase "$5 VPS" still makes sense as shorthand for "the cheapest server that runs a real app". I think 1 GB is too small for that today. A Node or Rails app plus Postgres wants 2 GB at the very least, and 4 GB leaves room for a second app and a Redis. My rough rule from the Hetzner article holds here too: 4 GB runs three to five small apps and one small database. That's my estimate, not a benchmark.

Are cheap VPS plans slow?

Some are. In VPSBenchmarks' published trials, Hetzner's CX23 scored 638 single-core in Geekbench 6, against 1,621 for Hostinger's KVM 1 and 1,245 for Linode's 4 GB plan. Cheap plans are shared vCPUs, and the CPU behind them varies by years. Price per GB of RAM tells you nothing about that, so check a benchmark before you pick on price alone.

I haven't benchmarked these servers myself. The numbers below are from VPSBenchmarks, which buys plans and runs the same test suite (Geekbench, sysbench, fio, iperf3 and a web load test) on each. Its overall score grades each plan against every other plan it has tested, and price is not a factor.

The last column is my arithmetic: VPSBenchmarks' multi-core score divided by today's monthly price. VPSBenchmarks hasn't published trials of OVHcloud's VPS-1, Netcup's VPS 500 or Lite plans, or IONOS's VPS M+, so I have no independent numbers for them and won't guess. One trial is one server on one day; a different host machine can score differently.

What I take from it:

• Hetzner's CX23 is slow per core and fast per dollar. Its single-core score is the lowest here, but two cores at $7 still give the most multi-core performance per dollar. Hetzner says the line is "for workloads that can handle variable CPU performance". A few web apps waiting on a database fit that. A CPU-heavy build server doesn't.
• Linode's 4 GB plan is the fastest of the five, with twice the multi-core score of the 1 vCPU plans. You pay $24 for it.
• Hostinger's single core is the quickest, on a recent EPYC. It's one vCPU, though, so the multi-core score stays near the 1 vCPU plans.

What's the catch with a very cheap VPS?

Usually the term, the intro price or the network. OVHcloud's and Netcup's best prices need a 6 to 12-month commitment. Hostinger's $6.49 is for 24 months paid upfront and renews at $11.99; IONOS charges $5 for three months, then $14. Netcup throttles sustained traffic, and OVHcloud caps its cheapest plan at 500 Mbps. Hetzner's catch is the CPU.

The fine print for each, from the providers' own pages:

• Netcup VPS 500: if your average traffic over 24 hours passes 2 TB, it's throttled to 200 Mbps until it drops. That's about 60 TB a month before it bites (plan details).
• Netcup VPS Lite: throttled to 100 Mbps if the 24-hour average passes 100 Mbps, on a 500 Mbps port, with no datacenter choice (Lite plans). Fine for an app, not for serving video.
• OVHcloud: "unlimited traffic" at 500 Mbps on VPS-1. In Mumbai, Singapore and Sydney there's a 1 TB monthly quota, then 10 Mbps (OVHcloud US).
• Hetzner: the IPv4 address costs €0.50 a month on top of every server. Prices exclude VAT, and the server is billed until you delete it, even when it's off.
• Hostinger and IONOS: the headline price is an intro price. Budget for the renewal: $11.99 and $14 for 4 GB.
• DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode: no contract and no tricks, but $5 to $6 per GB of RAM and overage past a few TB.

Backups vary: OVHcloud's VPS plans include a daily backup of the previous 24 hours and Hostinger's include weekly backups, while the rest charge extra or leave it to you. Whatever you pick, plan your own database dumps.

Is there a free VPS?

Yes: Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier includes Arm compute "equivalent to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of memory", 200 GB of block storage and 10 TB of outbound data a month, at $0. The catch is reclamation: Oracle can take back an instance it deems idle, meaning CPU, network and memory all under 20% over seven days.

From Oracle's Always Free resources page. A small app with little traffic can look exactly like that idle server. I think Oracle is great for a side project, a staging copy or learning Linux. I wouldn't put a paying customer's only copy on a server the provider can take back. The AMD micro instances in the same tier have 1 GB of RAM and an eighth of a core, which is too small for most apps.

Should you rent a VPS or pay a platform?

For an app with steady traffic and a database, I think a VPS wins on price by a wide margin. The 4 GB OVHcloud server is $4.54; Railway charges $10 per GB-month of RAM, so the same 4 GB is $40 a month before CPU at $20 per vCPU (Railway pricing). What you take on is the server: OS updates, backups and the 3 a.m. outage.

I went through every fee type platforms charge in the hidden costs of PaaS, and DigitalOcean's own Droplet-versus-App-Platform gap in DigitalOcean pricing. If you've never set up a server, how to set up a VPS covers the steps people actually do and the half you can skip.

I build Ployz, which turns a rented server into your own deploy platform: push to GitHub, it builds on the server, deploys with zero downtime once you set a health check and gives every pull request a preview environment with its own HTTPS address. It works on any of the servers above, amd64 or arm64, as long as it runs Linux with systemd.

Which cheap VPS should you pick?

Pick a platform like Railway or Render if you never want to touch a server and your app is small enough that the markup is a few dollars.

Pick DigitalOcean, Vultr or Akamai (Linode) if you want hourly billing in many cities, a big ecosystem and no contract, and you're fine paying $5 to $6 per GB of RAM.

Pick your own cheap server if you want the most app per dollar: Netcup's VPS 500 or Hetzner's CX23 in Europe, OVHcloud's VPS-1 or Netcup in Manassas in the US. At $5 to $10 a month for 4 GB, it's a quarter of what the big three charge, and a fraction of any platform.

Ployz runs your apps on that server with git-push deploys and preview environments, and it's free on your own servers.