VPS price per GB of RAM: 15 providers' cheapest plans compared (October 2026)

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Every VPS comparison says "from $5 a month". That number hides two things: how much memory the $5 buys, and what you have to sign to get it. We read the pricing pages of 15 providers on the same day and put the cheapest plans side by side, with the price of one gigabyte of RAM next to each.

How to read the tables

• Per month is what one month costs on the shortest term the provider sells: pay as you go, or a one-month term. Lower prices that need a year or two paid upfront are in their own table further down.
• Per GB of RAM is the monthly price divided by the memory. Memory is the limit you hit first on a small server, so it is the fairest single number.
• Prices are in the currency the provider lists. Contabo's are in euros; Hetzner publishes both and we show both.
• A plan in the "at least 2 GB" or "at least 4 GB" table can be the same plan as in the first table. Several providers no longer sell anything smaller than 4 GB.

The cheapest plan with at least 1 GB of RAM

What stands out:

• 1 GB is no longer the entry size everywhere. The smallest plans at OVHcloud, Hetzner and Database Mart have 4 GB, and Contabo's has 8 GB, for the price others charge for 1 GB.
• The $5 to $7 plans with 1 GB look alike and are not. Disk runs from 20 GB to 40 GB and included transfer from 1 TB to 5 TB.
• Billing granularity differs. DigitalOcean bills per second and the hourly providers bill by the hour, both with a monthly cap, so a two-hour test costs cents. Cherry Servers' $3.51 is the price of a one-month term; the same server billed by the hour is $0.018 an hour, which is about $13 over a full month.
• Hetzner's cheapest plans were out of stock. The CX23 and its Arm sibling CAX11 carried a "not available" label on the day, and the page says the number of servers is limited. The price is the one Hetzner's price list gives, including one IPv4 address.

If you need at least 2 GB

At 2 GB the classic clouds charge $10 to $14, and four providers sell 4 GB or more for less than that. If you do not need a specific provider, a 2 GB plan is rarely the best buy.

If you need at least 4 GB

Here the spread is widest: the same 4 GB costs between about $5 and $25 a month depending on where you buy it.

The ten lowest prices per GB of RAM

Low prices with strings attached

Some headline prices need a long prepaid term, or last only a few months. None of that is hidden, but it is rarely in the big number.

A long term is fine when you know you will keep the server. It is the wrong way to try a provider: pick an hourly or one-month price for the first weeks.

What the price does not tell you

• CPU. These are shared CPUs. A vCPU at one provider is not a vCPU at another, and none of the pages promise a level of performance. Only a test on the plan you intend to buy answers that.
• Tax. Every price here is without VAT or sales tax. In the EU and the UK the invoice is higher.
• IPv4. Hetzner's price includes one IPv4 address at €0.50 a month; without it the server is cheaper and reachable over IPv6 only. AWS Lightsail sells cheaper IPv6-only bundles too. The table uses the price with IPv4 for both. Database Mart's $5.99 plan comes with a shared IP address; a server that has to answer on ports 80 and 443 needs its own, which the page lists at $2 a month, or the next plan up, where it is included. The shared IP, the 24-month price and its refund terms are explained in Database Mart VPS pricing explained.
• Transfer. "Unlimited" comes with a speed (OVHcloud: 500 Mbps on VPS-1) or a fair-use clause (Contabo). Metered plans charge for the excess.
• Backups. Never included in these prices, except OVHcloud's daily backup of the previous 24 hours. Budget roughly 20% on top at the providers that sell backups as a percentage.
• Location. Prices are for the providers' standard regions. Hetzner charges more in the US and Singapore and includes far less transfer there.

Who is missing and why

• Scaleway prices compute, storage and the public IPv4 address separately, so there is no single plan price to put in a table.
• UpCloud renamed its plans in April 2026, and its pricing page would not load for our reader on the day. We left it out rather than guess.
• Kamatera lists a $4 card for 1 GB. Its other cards use a different, pricier CPU type and everything in between is priced in a calculator, so only the entry card is in the tables.
• Managed hosting such as Cloudways is a different product: what the managed layer costs on the same hardware.

What we have tested ourselves

One plan: DigitalOcean's $6 droplet, which runs our test server. The install times, memory and disk numbers are in Deploy Coolify on a $6 VPS in 15 minutes, and how that droplet is billed is in DigitalOcean droplet pricing explained. If the question is which of these plans can run a self-hosted platform, the sizing is in Which VPS for Coolify.

FAQ

What is the cheapest VPS with 1 GB of RAM?

On 2 Oct 2026 it was Cherry Servers' Cloud VPS 1 at $3.51 a month on a one-month term, followed by Kamatera at $4 and Vultr and Akamai (Linode) at $5. For a few cents more, OVHcloud and Contabo sell 4 GB and 8 GB.

Which VPS has the lowest price per GB of RAM?

Contabo's Cloud VPS 4, at €5.50 a month for 8 GB, or €0.69 per GB. OVHcloud's VPS-1 follows at $1.34 per GB (4 GB for $5.35 with no commitment).

Do these VPS prices include VAT?

No. All prices are as the providers list them, without VAT or sales tax.

Is a 4 GB server for $5 as good as a 4 GB server for $24?

Not necessarily. The price says nothing about CPU speed, disk speed, network quality or support. It tells you what the memory costs; the rest needs a test on that plan.

Sources

Read on 2 Oct 2026:

• DigitalOcean: pricing page and its plan data.
• Hetzner: plan pages plus the price API the page loads; prices with one IPv4 address.
• Vultr: pricing page and public plans API.
• Akamai (Linode): pricing page and public API.
• OVHcloud: VPS page (world, USD) and order catalog.
• Contabo: VPS page and Cloud VPS 4 configurator, EUR.
• AWS Lightsail: pricing page, bundles with a public IPv4 address.
• Cherry Servers: pricing page data.
• Kamatera: pricing page.
• KnownHost: unmanaged VPS page.
• Ultahost: VPS page with the billing-term switch.
• Scala Hosting: self-managed cloud VPS page.
• Database Mart: VPS page, Linux plans and their per-term prices.
• Hostinger: VPS page.
• IONOS: VPS page, US site.
• Cloudways: pricing page and its plan data.
• Coolify: pricing page.