A VPS costs about $6 a month, or $0.008 an hour, for the smallest plan at a typical provider in October 2026. That is the median of the 16 providers that price in US dollars in our sourced Hourly VPS Fine-Print Index; the full range runs from $2.00 to $12.80 a month ($0.003 to $0.018 an hour).
So the honest answer to “how much does a VPS cost?” depends on size and fine print. At DigitalOcean, Akamai (Linode), Vultr and AWS Lightsail, 2 GB of RAM lists at $10 to $12 a month, 4 GB at $20 to $24 and 8 GB at $40 to $48. On top of that, a public IPv4 address can add $3.65 a month, and a Windows license can cost more than the server itself. Every figure below links to the page it came from, with the arithmetic shown so you can check it.
Key takeaways
- In October 2026 the smallest hourly VPS plan at 16 US-dollar providers costs a median $0.0082 per hour, about $5.94 for a full month; the range is $0.003 to $0.018 per hour, or $2.00 to $12.80 a month.
- At DigitalOcean, Akamai (Linode), Vultr and AWS Lightsail a month costs $5 to $7 per GB of RAM, so a 4 GB VPS lists at $20 to $24 a month and an 8 GB VPS at $40 to $48.
- 12 of 20 providers keep billing a stopped server in full until it is deleted, and 4 charge separately for a public IPv4 address (about $3.65 a month at Google Cloud and Azure).
- Add-ons can outgrow the server: a Windows license on a Google Cloud e2-micro costs about 11 times the VM’s hourly rate, and Akamai backups add 40% to a $5 Nanode.
- Break-even hours = monthly price ÷ hourly rate: below that, hourly billing costs less; above it, a monthly plan does, unless hourly charges are capped at the monthly price, as at 11 of the 20 Index providers and at HourlyVPS.
How much does a VPS cost per hour and per month in 2026?
The table lists the smallest plan each provider bills by the hour or by a finer unit, as published on October 2, 2026, without promotions, free tiers or commitment discounts. “Full month” is what about 730 hours (an average month) costs: the capped monthly price where the provider caps hourly billing, otherwise the provider’s own 730-hour figure or the hourly rate × 730. “Monthly cap” says where hourly billing stops: at the monthly price, after 672 hours or at the 30-day price; “None” means every hour is billed.
Read the fine-print column before you compare rows. The lowest prices are often IPv6-only plans, or plans that bill the disk and the IPv4 address separately. If the term itself is new to you, start with what a VPS is.
| Provider | Smallest hourly plan | Per hour | Full month | Monthly cap | Read the fine print |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RamNode | Lite: 1 core, 1 GB, 15 GB NVMe | $0.003 | $2.00 | Monthly price | IPv6 only; with IPv4 the smallest is $0.006/hour ($4/month) |
| Vultr | Regular Performance: 1 vCPU, 0.5 GB, 10 GB | $0.004 | $2.50 | 672 hours | IPv6 only; its API lists $0.003/hour and stock in 2 regions. With IPv4: $0.005/hour ($3.50). 1 GB plan: $0.007/hour ($5) |
| AWS Lightsail | IPv6-only bundle: 2 vCPU, 512 MB, 20 GB | $0.0047 | $3.50 | Monthly price | With a public IPv4: $0.0067/hour ($5/month) |
| Kamatera | Type A: 1 core, 1 GB, 20 GB | ≈$0.0055 | ≈$4.00 | None stated | Read from its price calculator (monthly ÷ 730); billed per minute |
| DigitalOcean | Basic: 1 vCPU, 512 MiB, 10 GiB | $0.00595 | $4.00 | 672 hours | Billed per second; minimum 60 seconds or $0.01 |
| Civo | xSmall: 1 core, 1 GB, 25 GB NVMe | $0.00744 | $5.43 | None | Every hour in the month is billed |
| Akamai (Linode) | Nanode: 1 vCPU, 1 GB, 25 GB | $0.0075 | $5.00 | Monthly price | Jakarta $0.009/hour, São Paulo $0.0105/hour |
| IONOS Cloud Cubes | Basic Cube XS: 1 vCPU, 2 GB, 60 GB | $0.008 | $5.76 | 30-day price | IPv4 terms not published; billed per minute |
| Google Cloud | e2-micro: 2 shared vCPU, 1 GiB (us-central1) | $0.008376 | $6.11 | None | Boot disk and external IPv4 billed on top |
| Microsoft Azure | B2pts_v2 (Arm): 2 vCPU, 1 GiB (East US) | $0.0084 | $6.13 | None | Disk and static IPv4 billed on top |
| Exoscale | Standard Micro: 1 core, 512 MB + 10 GB disk | ≈$0.0087 | ≈$6.34 | None | Instance and minimum-disk rates added together |
| LightNode | Start: 1 vCPU, 2 GB, 50 GB NVMe | $0.012 | $7.71 | 672 hours | “From” price; the console can show other prices per location |
| Oracle Cloud | A1.Flex (Arm): 1 OCPU + 1 GB | ≈$0.0115 | ≈$8.40 | None | Boot volume extra; Oracle’s free A1 allowance can bring it to $0 |
| OVHcloud | d2-2: 1 vCore, 2 GB, 25 GB | $0.0123 | $8.98 | None | Separate monthly billing option: $6.74/month |
| Atlantic.Net | G3.2GB: 1 vCPU, 2 GB, 50 GB | $0.0149 | $10.00 | 672 hours | The $0.0119 headline is the 3-year commitment rate |
| Cherry Servers | Cloud VPS 1: 1 vCore, 1 GB, 20 GB | $0.018 | $12.80 | None | Excl. VAT; $10.53 on a monthly cycle |
| Scaleway | STARDUST1-S: 1 vCPU, 1 GB | €0.0006 | ≈€0.43 | None | Storage and IPv4 (€0.004/hour) extra; excl. VAT |
| UpCloud | Starter: 1 core, 1 GB, 10 GB | ≈€0.0045 | €3.00 | 672 hours | Hourly rate by UpCloud’s rule (monthly ÷ 672) |
| X-ZoneServers | Nano: 1 vCPU, 2 GB, 20 GB SSD | €0.0056 | €4.00 | Monthly price | Bucharest list price; other locations list higher |
| Hetzner Cloud | CX23: 2 vCPU, 4 GB, 40 GB | €0.0088 | €5.49 | Monthly price | Shown as not available; IPv4 €0.50/month extra; excl. VAT |
Lowest, median and highest VPS price
Across the 16 providers that price in US dollars:
| Measure (16 USD providers) | Per hour | Full month |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest | $0.003 (RamNode Lite, IPv6 only) | $2.00 |
| Median | $0.0082 | $5.94 |
| Highest | $0.018 (Cherry Servers) | $12.80 |
| Lowest with a public IPv4 | $0.005 (Vultr, limited stock) | $3.50 |
| Median with a public IPv4 | $0.00835 | $6.05 |
The highest smallest-plan price is about six times the lowest, per hour and per month. The four euro-priced providers sit in the same band: from €0.0006 per hour (Scaleway, before storage and IPv4) to €0.0088 (Hetzner), with full-month figures from €0.43 to €5.49.
How these numbers were computed
- Take the smallest hourly price for each of the 20 providers in the Index JSON. Every value in the file links to the page it came from.
- Keep the 16 priced in US dollars. The other 4 price in euros, and the Index does not convert currencies.
- Sort and take the middle. With 16 values the median is the mean of the 8th and 9th: IONOS at $0.008 and Google Cloud at $0.008376, so $0.00819.
- For the full month, apply each provider’s cap. Multiplying by 730 overstates capped plans: RamNode’s $0.003 × 730 is $2.19, but its Lite plan stops at $2.00. The full-month median is the mean of $5.76 (IONOS) and $6.11 (Google Cloud).
You can rerun the hourly figures with Python 3 and no extra packages:
import json
import statistics
import urllib.request
URL = "https://www.hourlyvps.com/wp-content/uploads/hvps-data/hourly-vps-index.json"
request = urllib.request.Request(URL, headers={"User-Agent": "index-check/1.0"})
with urllib.request.urlopen(request) as response:
index = json.load(response)
usd = sorted(
p["cheapest_hourly"]["amount"]
for p in index["providers"]
if p["cheapest_hourly"]["currency"] == "USD"
)
print(len(usd), "providers priced in USD")
print("min", min(usd), "median", round(statistics.median(usd), 5), "max", max(usd))With the October 2, 2026 data (Index version 0.1.0), it prints 16 providers, a minimum of 0.003, a median of 0.00819 and a maximum of 0.018 dollars per hour. The data is published under CC BY 4.0, so you can reuse it with attribution; the Index page shows all 12 fields per provider.
VPS price per month by size: 1 GB to 16 GB
The smallest plan is rarely the one you run. This is how monthly list prices scale with RAM at four large providers with public price lists, next to the HourlyVPS Quartz plans (shared vCPU, NVMe storage). All are Linux prices in the default region, checked October 3, 2026.
| RAM | DigitalOcean Basic | Akamai (Linode) Shared | Vultr Regular | AWS Lightsail (with IPv4) | HourlyVPS Quartz (monthly cap) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 GB | $6.00 (1 vCPU) | $5.00 (1 vCPU) | $5.00 (1 vCPU) | $7.00 (2 vCPU) | $5.00 (1 vCPU) |
| 2 GB | $12.00 (1 vCPU) | $12.00 (1 vCPU) | $10.00 (1 vCPU) | $12.00 (2 vCPU) | $10.00 (1 vCPU) |
| 4 GB | $24.00 (2 vCPU) | $24.00 (2 vCPU) | $20.00 (2 vCPU) | $24.00 (2 vCPU) | $15.00 (2 vCPU) |
| 8 GB | $48.00 (4 vCPU) | $48.00 (4 vCPU) | $40.00 (4 vCPU) | $44.00 (2 vCPU) | $25.00 (4 vCPU) |
| 16 GB | $96.00 (8 vCPU) | $96.00 (6 vCPU) | $80.00 (6 vCPU) | $84.00 (4 vCPU) | $45.00 (8 vCPU) |
Two patterns hold across these four providers. A month costs $5 to $7 per GB of RAM at every size, and $5 to $6 per GB from 2 GB up, so the price doubles when the RAM doubles. Dedicated (non-shared) vCPUs cost more for the same RAM: Akamai lists its 2-vCPU, 4 GB plan at $24 a month with shared cores and $36 with dedicated ones. HourlyVPS sells dedicated, CPU-pinned vCPUs as the Chrono family; the smallest, with 2 vCPUs and 8 GB, is capped at $35.00/month. Every plan is listed per hour, per day and with its monthly cap on the pricing page.
Where the large clouds fit better: per the Index, these four run in 16 to 33 data centers or regions each, against HourlyVPS’s one location today, Istanbul, with New York coming soon. If your users are far from Istanbul, a provider with a nearby region will serve them with lower latency.
What determines the price of a VPS?
- CPU type. Shared vCPUs draw on a pool of host cores; dedicated vCPUs are reserved for you and cost more (+50% in the Akamai example above).
- RAM. The main size lever. Most price lists step in powers of two.
- Storage. SSD or NVMe capacity is usually bundled. At Google Cloud, Azure, Oracle and Scaleway the disk is a separate line item.
- Transfer. Bundled allowances run from 500 GiB a month (DigitalOcean’s $4 plan) to unmetered, and overage is billed per GB.
- Public IPv4. Included at 13 of the 20 Index providers, billed separately at 4, extra on some instance types at 1 (OVHcloud) and not published at 2.
- Location. Akamai charges $6 instead of $5 for a Nanode in Jakarta and $7 in São Paulo. Choose the location for latency first; how to choose a VPS location explains the trade-off.
- Billing model. Per second, minute or started hour; capped or uncapped; prepaid or post-paid. These rules decide how much of the hourly rate you actually pay.
- Management. Every price here is for a self-managed (unmanaged) server, where you run the operating system yourself. Managed plans, where the host patches and supports the server for you, cost more; VPS vs shared hosting covers where each fits.
Hidden VPS costs: what the headline price leaves out
These line items are why two “$5 servers” end up costing different amounts. The examples come from the Index (checked October 2, 2026) and from provider pages checked October 3, 2026.
| Cost | Example from the data | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Public IPv4 | Google Cloud and Azure $0.005/hour; Scaleway €0.004/hour; Hetzner €0.50/month | About $3.65 a month on Google Cloud and Azure |
| Stopped server | 12 of 20 providers bill a powered-off server in full | The full plan price until you delete it |
| Backups | Akamai $2.00/month on the $5 Nanode; DigitalOcean 20% (weekly) or 30% (daily) | +20% to +40% of the plan |
| Snapshots | DigitalOcean $0.06/GB-month; AWS Lightsail $0.05/GB-month | $1.00 to $1.20 a month for 20 GB |
| Windows license | Google Cloud $0.046 per vCPU-hour; Azure B2ats_v2 $0.0186/hour with Windows vs $0.0094 with Linux | From about double to 11 times the VM price |
| Bandwidth overage | Akamai $0.005/GB; DigitalOcean $0.01/GiB; AWS Lightsail from $0.09/GB | $1 to $18 for 200 GB over |
| Taxes | Hetzner, Scaleway and Cherry Servers list prices excluding VAT | VAT or sales tax on top |
IPv4 address fees
Four Index providers bill the public IPv4 address on top of the server: Google Cloud and Azure at $0.005 per hour (about $3.65 a month; see Google’s IP pricing), Scaleway at €0.004 per hour and Hetzner at €0.50 a month. OVHcloud began billing IPv4 separately on its Gen 3 instances on October 1, 2026, at €0.0027 per hour, while its price-list footnote still said on October 3 that instances include an IPv4 address. Three providers sell an IPv6-only plan as their lowest price: AWS Lightsail ($3.50, or $5 with IPv4), Vultr ($2.50, or $3.50) and RamNode (Lite, plus $2 a month for IPv4).
Worked example: a Google Cloud e2-micro in us-central1 lists at $0.008376 per hour. Add an external IPv4 at $0.005 per hour and a 10 GiB balanced boot disk at $0.000136986 per GiB-hour, and 730 hours cost about $6.11 + $3.65 + $1.00 = $10.76, not $6.11. Google’s Free Tier can cover one e2-micro a month in three US regions; this example uses list prices.
On HourlyVPS: Every server comes with one dedicated IPv4 address and IPv6, included in the plan price.
Stopped servers still cost money
Powering a server off rarely stops the bill. In the Index, 12 of 20 providers bill a stopped server in full until it is deleted, 5 stop the compute charge but keep billing disks and IP addresses, and 3 depend on the plan or on how you stop it. Azure, for example, keeps billing a VM shut down from inside the operating system, while a deallocated VM pays only for its disks and networking.
Example: a 4 GB DigitalOcean Droplet at $0.03571 per hour, left powered off for two weeks (336 hours), still costs $12.00. The way out is a snapshot followed by a delete; the checklist before you delete a VPS covers what to save first, and which VPS providers bill stopped servers has the rule for all 20 providers. On HourlyVPS: A stopped server is still billed, because its vCPU, memory, disk and IP addresses stay reserved for you; only deleting the server stops billing.
Backups and snapshots
Automated backups are usually a percentage or a fixed add-on. Akamai lists backups for the $5 Nanode at $2.00 a month, 40% of the plan. DigitalOcean charges 20% of the Droplet’s monthly cost for weekly backups and 30% for daily ones, so a $24 Droplet pays $4.80 or $7.20 more. Snapshots bill by stored size: $0.06 per GB-month at DigitalOcean and $0.05 at AWS Lightsail, so 20 GB of snapshots costs $1.20 or $1.00 a month.
Windows licenses
A Windows Server license is a second meter running next to the server. Google Cloud charges $0.046 per visible vCPU per hour, so a 2-vCPU e2-micro pays $0.092 per hour for Windows on top of $0.008376 for the VM: about 11 times the VM price, or $67.16 over 730 hours.
Azure builds the license into a separate Windows rate: in East US its x86 B2ats_v2 costs $0.0186 per hour with Windows against $0.0094 with Linux, about double (Azure Retail Prices API). Atlantic.Net prices its 2 GB plan at $16.50 a month with Windows against $10.00 with Linux. Every price in the tables above is for Linux.
Bandwidth overage
Bundled transfer covers most small servers, but overage rates differ by more than ten times. For 200 GB beyond the allowance, Akamai charges $0.005 per GB ($1.00), DigitalOcean $0.01 per GiB ($2.00 for 200 GiB), and AWS Lightsail from $0.09 per GB in US regions ($18.00). Lightsail counts inbound and outbound traffic against the allowance (only outbound overage is charged), and six of its Asia Pacific and South America regions get half the allowance. Akamai prorates the allowance for servers that exist for only part of the month.
On HourlyVPS: Istanbul plans include the monthly traffic allowance listed for each plan, prorated for a server that exists for part of a billing period. The allowance for each plan is on the pricing page, and the network page describes the network behind it.
Taxes, currency and commitment prices
List prices are usually before tax. Hetzner, Scaleway, Cherry Servers and OVHcloud state theirs excluding VAT, so a customer who owes VAT pays it on top. A euro price also moves with the exchange rate if your card is in dollars. Prices are in US dollars only and exclude taxes; any VAT or sales tax is added on the invoice according to your country.
Check which column a headline comes from. Atlantic.Net’s “from $0.0119 per hour” is its 3-year commitment rate; on demand, the same plan is $0.0149. Cherry Servers lists $10.53 a month on a monthly cycle against about $12.80 at its hourly rate, and OVHcloud’s monthly billing for the d2-2 is $6.74 against about $8.98 at the hourly rate.
Billing rounding and prepaid minimums
Rounding matters when servers live for minutes. Take 100 CI jobs of 6 minutes each, each on a fresh 4 GB server. Akamai rounds every server up to a full hour, so the jobs cost 100 × $0.036 = $3.60. DigitalOcean bills per second with a $0.01 minimum per Droplet, so they cost 100 × $0.01 = $1.00.
On HourlyVPS: Billing is by the hour: every hour a server exists is charged at the plan’s hourly rate. The price tapes and cost tables on this site count every started hour as a full hour, so they show the most a duration can cost; the cost calculator charges a partial hour to the nearest cent, as the bill does. Charges are deducted in whole cents: a full hour costs exactly the hourly rate, and a partial first or last hour is rounded to the nearest cent, never more than a full hour. Each new server also takes its own initial credit, so for many short jobs one server that runs them in turn is simpler than a server per job; per-second vs per-hour billing works through more cases.
Prepaid providers also want money before the first server. RamNode’s pages give both $3 and $10 as the minimum, and UpCloud asks for a one-time €10 or $10 deposit. HourlyVPS has a $5 minimum top-up, and each new server starts with an initial credit, paid at checkout, that funds that server’s hours. That money pays for usage rather than being charged as a fee, but it is cash you commit up front. You can pay by card or crypto; see payment methods.
What does a month of hourly billing cost?
A month of hourly billing costs the hourly rate × the hours the server exists, unless the provider caps it. Hourly wins for short jobs and a monthly plan wins for a server that runs all month; the crossover is one division:
Break-even hours = monthly price ÷ hourly rate. Run fewer hours than that and hourly billing costs less. Run more and the monthly plan costs less, or the same where the provider caps the hourly bill.
Where a provider caps hourly bills, the cap usually arrives before the month ends: DigitalOcean’s $4.00 ÷ $0.00595 is 672 hours (28 days), and Akamai’s $5.00 ÷ $0.0075 is about 667 hours. Without a cap, a forgotten server keeps billing: OVHcloud’s d2-2 at $0.0123 per hour costs $9.15 over a 31-day month (744 hours), against $6.74 on its monthly billing option.
HourlyVPS caps the hourly bill. A server is charged by the hour from prepaid credit. Charges are deducted in whole cents: a full hour costs exactly the hourly rate, and a partial first or last hour is rounded to the nearest cent, never more than a full hour. Once a server’s charges in a billing period (one month from your order date) reach the plan’s monthly price, the rest of that period is free. Every plan’s monthly price is 500 times its hourly rate, so on every plan the cap arrives after 500 hours (about 20.8 days) in a billing period; DigitalOcean’s arrives after 672 hours. So one server covers every duration: an hourly VPS for a test, a daily VPS at 24 hours of billing per day, or a monthly VPS that simply stays on, with no contract. This is what a Quartz Q4 (2 vCPU, 4 GB, 80 GB NVMe) costs for each duration:
| Duration | Hours on the meter | Cost $0.03 | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 hour | 1 | $0.03 | |
| 8 hours | 8 | $0.24 | |
| 1 day | 24 | $0.72 | |
| 3 days | 72 | $2.16 | |
| 7 days | 168 | $5.04 | |
| 30 days | 720 | $15.00 | Capped at the monthly price |
If you do not know how long you will need the server, you do not have to guess. There is no billing mode to pick, no cycle to prepay and nothing to switch later: delete the server when the job ends and billing stops, or leave it on and the cap limits the month.
To see how the cap compares with providers that bill every hour, read hourly vs monthly VPS; to price your own hours on any provider’s plan, use the VPS cost calculator. How the meter runs on HourlyVPS, step by step, is in hourly VPS billing explained.
What common workloads cost on HourlyVPS
The totals below come from the live HourlyVPS price list, so they stay current. Each one is the hourly bill for that duration, with the monthly cap applied. Plan choices follow a project’s documented requirements where it publishes them; otherwise they are our starting point, and the linked guide covers sizing in detail.
| Job | Plan | How long | Total on HourlyVPS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discord bot or Telegram bot, always on | Quartz Q1: 1 vCPU, 1 GB | 1 month | $5.00 |
| Self-hosted n8n workflows, always on | Quartz Q2: 1 vCPU, 2 GB | 1 month | $10.00 |
| AI agent that calls a hosted model API, always on | Quartz Q2: 1 vCPU, 2 GB | 1 month | $10.00 |
| Claude Code remote dev box (Anthropic lists 4 GB+ RAM) | Quartz Q4: 2 vCPU, 4 GB | 1 month | $15.00 |
| WireGuard VPN for a 7-day trip | Quartz Q1: 1 vCPU, 1 GB | 7 days | $1.68 |
| Minecraft server for a weekend, 5–10 players (starting point) | Quartz Q4: 2 vCPU, 4 GB | 53 hours | $1.59 |
| Palworld dedicated server for a weekend (Pocketpair lists 4+ cores and 16 GB) | Chrono C16: 4 dedicated vCPU, 16 GB | 52 hours | $6.76 |
| Valheim dedicated server for a weekend, 5–10 players | Quartz Q8: 4 vCPU, 8 GB | 53 hours | $2.65 |
| k6 load test of your own staging site | Chrono C8: 2 dedicated vCPU, 8 GB | 3 hours | $0.21 |
| GitHub Actions self-hosted runner for one workday | Chrono C8: 2 dedicated vCPU, 8 GB | 8 hours | $0.56 |
| Linux practice lab, one evening | Quartz Q1: 1 vCPU, 1 GB | 3 hours | $0.03 |
Warning: run load tests and scans only against systems you own or have written permission to test, and use a VPN only where local law allows it. The acceptable use policy applies to every server.
How to estimate your VPS cost in six steps
- Size from requirements. Start from the software’s documented minimum RAM and CPU, then add headroom you can justify.
- Estimate the hours. A fixed window (a test, an event, a trip) or always on.
- Pick the billing model with the break-even formula above. Always-on servers go monthly, unless the provider caps hourly charges at the monthly price, as HourlyVPS does.
- Add the line items: IPv4, disk, backups or snapshots, licenses and any traffic beyond the allowance.
- Check the stopped-server rule and plan to delete, not just stop, the server when the job ends.
- Add tax for your country and, for prices in another currency, a margin for the exchange rate.
The VPS cost calculator does steps 2 and 3 for any provider: load one of its 10 provider presets or an HourlyVPS plan, or type in your own prices. To compare three large hourly clouds rule by rule, see Vultr vs DigitalOcean vs Hetzner billing, and for all 20 providers side by side, the Fine-Print Index.
Deploy this setup
Run a short job on a 2 GB server, billed by the hour
Quartz Q2 · 1 shared vCPU · 2 GB RAM · 50 GB NVMe · Istanbul
- Per hour$0.02/hourFor this job
- Per day (24 h)$0.48/day
- Monthly cap$10.00/month
Starts with a $5 initial credit, which goes into the server’s balance and pays for its hours.
Billed by the hour, never more than $10.00 per billing period. Delete the server and billing stops.
