VPS Price Per GB of RAM: 795 Plans Across 42 Hosts
A gigabyte of RAM on a virtual server costs $0.47 per month. It also costs $58.00 per month. Both prices were live on 15 October 2026, and both are exactly what they were when we first ran this count on 31 August.
We priced every plan in our database that publishes a RAM figure: 795 active VPS and cloud plans from 42 providers, EUR prices converted to USD, everything normalised to dollars per gigabyte per month. The gap between the cheapest and the dearest gigabyte is still 123x. The median moved, from $6.00 in August to $5.75 now, and the reason it moved is narrower than it looks.
Plenty changed underneath. Netcup replaced its VPS range in September at 40% higher prices. IONOS raised every VPS plan on 18 September. Three hosts joined the data set: Cloudzy, is*hosting and Godlike.Host. None of that reached either end of the range. The median shift comes almost entirely from the newcomers, and the 39 hosts we already tracked still put their median at $6.00 to the cent.
How we counted
Every number here comes from our nightly price readings, the latest taken on 15 October 2026. The rules:
- Only plans that are active and not marked out of stock, with both a price and a stated RAM figure. VPS and cloud categories only, so no shared hosting and no dedicated metal.
- Prices converted to USD at our stored rate of $1.15 per euro for the nine EUR-billed hosts in the set: Contabo, Diploi, Evolution Host, Godlike.Host, Hetzner, Netcup, OVHcloud, Private Hosting and Time4VPS.
- Netcup and Godlike.Host publish prices with VAT included (Godlike.Host charges the same amount inside and outside the EU). The other seven EUR hosts quote net prices. We used every price as published, so Netcup and Godlike.Host read roughly 19 to 20% higher than a net-to-net comparison would show.
- Every price includes one public IPv4 address. Where a host sells the smallest plan without one (Vultr's 0.5 GB plan, Cloudzy's 512 MB plan), the address is added.
- Monthly-equivalent pricing. A 24-month Contabo term shows as its per-month figure, which is how the provider advertises it.
- OVHcloud's catalogue in our data holds two VPS generations, a 2026 range and a 2027 range, plus its Value, Essential, Comfort and Elite plans. All are active and all are counted, as in August.
- Railway's Pro plan is excluded. Its 1 TB figure is an account ceiling rather than provisioned memory, and including it would have handed the crown to a plan that does not give you a 1 TB server.
- Fly.io's storage and bandwidth are usage-based and not counted against the RAM price.
- The renewal column is the regular rate each host advertises after the intro price. For hosts that publish a single price, it repeats that price. Hosts do not publish invoices, so nobody outside your account can promise what a renewal bill will say.
The cheapest gigabyte at each host
For each of the 42 providers we took its single best plan by dollars per GB, then looked up that plan's renewal price. As of 15 October 2026, 24 hosts sell RAM at under $3.00 per GB. Contabo Cloud VPS 18 leads at $0.47 per GB per month (96 GB for $45.08) and renews at the same rate. The renewal column is where the order breaks up.
| Provider | Best plan | RAM | Price/mo | $/GB intro | $/GB renewal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Contabo | Cloud VPS 18 | 96 GB | $45.08 | $0.47 | $0.47 |
| Time4VPS | Container C16 | 16 GB | $8.06 | $0.50 | $1.01 |
| NameHero | Business VPS | 32 GB | $20.68 | $0.65 | $1.50 |
| OVHcloud | VPS-6 2026 | 96 GB | $71.35 | $0.74 | $0.74 |
| Hostinger | KVM 4 | 16 GB | $12.99 | $0.81 | $1.81 |
| IONOS | VPS XXL+ | 24 GB | $20.00 | $0.83 | $2.83 |
| HostGator | Snappy 4000 NVMe 8 | 8 GB | $8.36 | $1.04 | $2.34 |
| DreamHost | Stack 16 | 16 GB | $17.49 | $1.09 | $1.66 |
| A2 Hosting | Self Managed Linux 16GB | 16 GB | $17.99 | $1.12 | $3.06 |
| HostArmada | Unmanaged Ignition | 16 GB | $19.00 | $1.19 | $2.64 |
| Netcup | VPS 8000 G12.5 | 64 GB | $77.18 | $1.21 | $1.21 |
| InMotion Hosting | VPS 8 vCPU | 16 GB | $22.99 | $1.44 | $3.56 |
| Private Hosting | VPS-RAM-64GB | 64 GB | $91.99 | $1.44 | $1.44 |
| InterServer | 8 Slices | 16 GB | $24.00 | $1.50 | $1.50 |
| ServaRica | Slim Slice 16 | 64 GB | $97.17 | $1.52 | $1.52 |
| Bluehost | NVME 8 | 8 GB | $12.99 | $1.62 | $3.62 |
| GoDaddy | 32 vCPU / 128 GB RAM | 128 GB | $219.99 | $1.72 | $2.66 |
| HostPapa | Unmanaged Excel | 16 GB | $29.95 | $1.87 | $3.75 |
| Namecheap | Hypernova | 24 GB | $46.88 | $1.95 | $2.20 |
| Diploi | Cloud XS | 2 GB | $4.70 | $2.35 | $2.35 |
| is*hosting | VPS Exclusive | 32 GB | $76.49 | $2.39 | $2.39 |
| Linode | High Memory 48GB | 48 GB | $120.00 | $2.50 | $2.50 |
| UltaHost | VPS Enterprise | 6 GB | $17.24 | $2.87 | $5.75 |
| Godlike.Host | Nitro 4 | 16 GB | $46.58 | $2.91 | $2.91 |
Past that group the numbers climb quickly. Hostwinds' best ratio is $3.36 per GB, AWS's $4.50, Cloudzy's $4.66 and Hetzner's $4.69. Hetzner's cheaper CX and CAX lines are marked out of stock in our data, so its figure comes from the CPX range. Vultr sits at $5.00 and DigitalOcean at $5.25. Cloudways cannot get under $9.66 and SiteGround's cloud entry point still works out at $12.50 per GB.
The top three are the same three hosts, in the same order and at the same rates, as in August. Contabo in first place surprises nobody who has shopped European VPS before. Second place is the one people do not expect: Time4VPS, a Lithuanian host most buyers have never heard of, selling 16 GB containers for $8.06 a month. Its catch is in the renewal column, where the price doubles.
The changes are further down. IONOS's September increase dropped it from fourth to sixth, which lifted OVHcloud to fourth and Hostinger from sixth to fifth without either changing a price. Netcup fell from seventh to eleventh, and its best rate went from $0.86 to $1.21. That is a real price increase, covered in the section on price moves below. Of the newcomers, is*hosting lands at $2.39 per GB and Godlike.Host at $2.91, both mid-table, both publishing one price per plan. Godlike.Host's figure includes VAT, as Netcup's does.
Renewal reshuffles the whole board
On 15 October 2026, 23 of the 42 hosts in our VPS and cloud data publish a single price per plan. The other 19 advertise an intro rate followed by a regular rate. Ranking each host's best plan by its renewal price moves IONOS from sixth to eighteenth and lifts Netcup from eleventh to fourth.
IONOS runs the steepest step in the set. VPS XXL+ is $20.00 at signup and $68.00 at its regular rate, 3.4x on a plan whose specs do not change. A2 Hosting moves from ninth to twentieth on renewal. InMotion Hosting moves from twelfth to twenty-third, and UltaHost from twenty-third to thirty-fourth.
Movement runs the other way too. OVHcloud is fourth cheapest at signup and second cheapest at renewal. InterServer, whose flat $1.50 per GB looks unremarkable next to Contabo's $0.47, climbs from fourteenth to sixth simply by publishing one number. Godlike.Host climbs five places the same way.
| Provider | Rank at signup | Rank at renewal | Move |
|---|---|---|---|
| OVHcloud | 4 | 2 | +2 |
| Netcup | 11 | 4 | +7 |
| Private Hosting | 13 | 5 | +8 |
| InterServer | 14 | 6 | +8 |
| ServaRica | 15 | 8 | +7 |
| Linode | 22 | 15 | +7 |
| Godlike.Host | 24 | 19 | +5 |
| Time4VPS | 2 | 3 | -1 |
| NameHero | 3 | 7 | -4 |
| Hostinger | 5 | 10 | -5 |
| A2 Hosting | 9 | 20 | -11 |
| InMotion Hosting | 12 | 23 | -11 |
| UltaHost | 23 | 34 | -11 |
| IONOS | 6 | 18 | -12 |
Contabo is first in both columns. It publishes one price for each plan, and that price is the whole argument for buying there.
If you want to see what a specific step costs you over a full term rather than a month, our true cost calculator does that arithmetic, and we went deeper on the pattern in monthly vs annual vs 3-year plans.
What 8 GB actually costs, host by host
As of 15 October 2026, 40 of the 42 hosts sell an 8 GB VPS or cloud plan, and 17 of them price it under $20 a month. The cheapest are Time4VPS Container C8 at $5.04 (renewing at $10.07) and Contabo Cloud VPS 4 at $5.06 flat. The table lists every 8 GB plan under $20, then six well-known reference points above it.
| Provider | Plan | vCPU | Storage | Price/mo | Renews at |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Time4VPS | Container C8 | 3 | 100 GB SSD | $5.04 | $10.07 |
| Contabo | Cloud VPS 4 | 4 | 100 GB SSD | $5.06 | $5.06 |
| OVHcloud | VPS-1 2026 | 4 | 75 GB NVMe | $6.35 | $6.35 |
| NameHero | Plus VPS | 2 | 100 GB NVMe | $6.85 | $15.92 |
| IONOS | VPS L+ | 4 | 240 GB NVMe | $8.00 | $25.00 |
| HostGator | Snappy 4000 NVMe 8 | 4 | 200 GB NVMe | $8.36 | $18.70 |
| Hostinger | KVM 2 | 2 | 100 GB NVMe | $8.99 | $14.99 |
| HostArmada | Unmanaged Fusion | 4 | 160 GB NVMe | $9.67 | $21.48 |
| A2 Hosting | Self Managed Linux 8GB | 4 | 160 GB NVMe | $9.99 | $29.00 |
| DreamHost | Stack 8 | 2 | 150 GB NVMe | $10.99 | $16.99 |
| InterServer | 4 Slices | 2 | 160 GB SSD | $12.00 | $12.00 |
| Bluehost | NVME 8 | 4 | 200 GB NVMe | $12.99 | $28.99 |
| ServaRica | Slim Slice 2 | 2 | 250 GB NVMe | $13.75 | $13.75 |
| Private Hosting | VPS-RAM-8GB | 2 | 50 GB NVMe | $14.94 | $14.94 |
| InMotion Hosting | VPS 4 vCPU | 4 | 160 GB | $14.99 | $26.99 |
| Netcup | VPS 1000 ARM G12.5 | 4 | 128 GB NVMe | $16.68 | $16.68 |
| HostPapa | Unmanaged Achieve | 8 | 200 GB NVMe | $19.95 | $39.99 |
| Vultr | CC Regular 4vCPU/8 GB | 4 | 160 GB SSD | $40.00 | $40.00 |
| Hetzner | CPX32 | 4 | 160 GB NVMe | $41.39 | $41.39 |
| DigitalOcean | Basic Premium AMD 8 GiB | 2 | 100 GiB NVMe | $42.00 | $42.00 |
| Linode | Shared Linode 8GB | 4 | 160 GB SSD | $48.00 | $48.00 |
| Cloudways | Vultr Basic Large | 4 | 160 GB SSD | $99.00 | $99.00 |
| SiteGround | Jump Start | 4 | 40 GB SSD | $100.00 | $100.00 |
Compare the Cloudways row with the Vultr row. Cloudways charges $99 for a 4 vCPU, 8 GB, 160 GB Vultr server that Vultr sells directly for $40, and the $59 difference pays for the managed layer: patching, staging, a control panel and support that answers. Godlike.Host shows the same split inside one catalogue. Its Nitro 3 and Vertex 3 are both 4 vCPU, 8 GB and 100 GB NVMe on the same EPYC 75F3 host CPU. The managed Vertex 3 costs $126.12 against $23.38 for the unmanaged Nitro 3, a 5.4x step. Whether either premium is worth it depends on how many hours of your own time you were planning to spend on server administration. We took that question apart in managed vs unmanaged VPS.
SiteGround's Jump Start is the one row that resists any justification on the numbers. $100 for 8 GB and 40 GB of disk is 20x Contabo's rate for the same memory, with less than half the storage.
Bigger boxes do not get you cheaper RAM
Across the market, the median price per GB falls only modestly with plan size and then rises again. In our 15 October 2026 readings it is $7.00 under 4 GB, $5.62 at 8 GB and $5.25 at 16 and 32 GB, then climbs back to $6.00 at 64 GB and $6.89 for plans of 96 GB and up. The cheapest available rate goes from $1.00 under 4 GB to $0.47 at the top.
| RAM size | Plans | Median $/GB | Cheapest $/GB |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 4 GB | 120 | $7.00 | $1.00 |
| 4 GB | 100 | $5.90 | $0.83 |
| 8 GB | 116 | $5.62 | $0.63 |
| 16 GB | 113 | $5.25 | $0.50 |
| 32 GB | 91 | $5.25 | $0.65 |
| 64 GB | 61 | $6.00 | $0.53 |
| 96 GB and up | 99 | $6.89 | $0.47 |
Both columns are right at once, because the volume discount is real inside some hosts and missing at others. (The 95 plans at sizes between these rows, such as 6, 12, 24 or 48 GB, are left out of this table and counted everywhere else.)
Ranked by how much cheaper a provider's largest plan is per gigabyte than its smallest:
| Provider | Smallest plan $/GB | Largest plan $/GB | Discount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Private Hosting | $5.74 (1 GB) | $1.44 (64 GB) | 4.0x |
| Time4VPS | $5.10 (0.5 GB) | $1.60 (64 GB) | 3.2x |
| HostArmada | $3.69 (1 GB) | $1.19 (16 GB) | 3.1x |
| OVHcloud | $2.02 (2 GB) | $0.74 (96 GB) | 2.7x |
| Contabo | $1.26 (4 GB) | $0.47 (96 GB) | 2.7x |
| GoDaddy | $4.50 (2 GB) | $1.72 (128 GB) | 2.6x |
| Cloudzy | $12.92 (0.5 GB) | $5.00 (64 GB) | 2.6x |
| is*hosting | $5.94 (1 GB) | $2.39 (32 GB) | 2.5x |
| Hostinger | $1.62 (4 GB) | $0.81 (32 GB) | 2.0x |
| Vultr | $7.00 (0.5 GB) | $5.00 (256 GB) | 1.4x |
| DigitalOcean | $8.00 (0.5 GB) | $6.19 (384 GB) | 1.3x |
| InterServer | $1.50 (2 GB) | $1.50 (16 GB) | 1.0x |
| Netcup | $2.38 (4 GB) | $2.60 (128 GB) | 0.9x |
| A2 Hosting | $1.62 (4 GB) | $2.86 (256 GB) | 0.6x |
| SiteGround | $12.50 (8 GB) | $20.00 (20 GB) | 0.6x |
| Kamatera | $4.00 (1 GB) | $7.88 (8 GB) | 0.5x |
| Fly.io | $8.76 (256 MB) | $16.50 (32 GB) | 0.5x |
| Diploi | $2.35 (2 GB) | $4.77 (32 GB) | 0.5x |
Two of those discounts come from the IPv4 address rather than from the memory. Cloudzy's 512 MB plan costs $6.46 once its address is added, more than its 1 GB plan at $5.56. Vultr's 0.5 GB plan is $3.50 with an address; from 1 GB upward Vultr sells memory at a straight $5.00 per GB. InterServer is just as linear at $1.50, and so is Godlike.Host's Nitro line at €2.54 per GB from Nitro 1 (2 GB) to Nitro 6 (64 GB). On price lists like those, comparison shopping is trivial, and buying more RAM than you need earns you nothing.
The bottom of the table is where scaling up costs more per gigabyte. Netcup's largest plan is a root server with dedicated cores, which is why its 128 GB tier reads dearer per GB than its 4 GB VPS. Fly.io's Performance tier at $16.50 per GB against its own $8.76 shared tier is a dedicated-vCPU premium too. That explains it, but read the price before you scale a Fly app upward on autopilot.
Why cheap RAM is cheap
Contabo's $0.47 and DigitalOcean's $5.25 are two different products, and the price tags reflect that. Four things account for most of the gap.
CPU allocation. Budget hosts oversubscribe cores heavily. Contabo's 96 GB plan comes with 18 shared vCPU cores, and you will feel the neighbours under sustained load. Hetzner's CCX line and Vultr's Optimized range give you dedicated cores, which is why their per-GB numbers look terrible. On those plans you are paying for the core, and the memory comes with it.
Network. Contabo, Netcup and OVHcloud list unlimited transfer. DigitalOcean and Linode meter it precisely and charge overages. Our data shows Hostinger's KVM 4 including 16 TB of transfer, while Vultr's 8 GB plans cap at 4 to 6 TB.
Support is the third. A $5 Contabo ticket goes into a queue. LiquidWeb answers in minutes and staffs Linux engineers around the clock, and that difference is roughly half the price of a managed plan.
The fourth is recovery time when something breaks. It never shows up in a spec table, and once you are hosting anything that earns money it matters more than the other three combined.
None of that makes $12.50 per GB defensible at SiteGround. It does make $5.25 per GB defensible at DigitalOcean if you build on the API and the managed databases that come with it. Choose the tier that matches how you actually operate, then compare inside it: Contabo against OVHcloud for the European budget end, DigitalOcean against Hostinger when you are weighing a developer cloud against a value VPS.
Why the median slipped to $5.75
On 15 October 2026, 34 of the 795 plans in this count price RAM at exactly $6.00 per GB: 14 from Vultr, 9 from Linode, 8 from DigitalOcean and 3 from AWS. That block of identical prices from US developer clouds held the median at $6.00 in August. Without the three new hosts it still does: the other 742 plans have a median of exactly $6.00.
The newcomers tipped it. Cloudzy put 9 of its 10 plans below $6.00 per GB, is*hosting all 11, and Godlike.Host 20 of its 32. That is 40 of 53 new plans on the cheap side of the block, enough to pull the midpoint down to $5.75. No existing host's prices did it.
We have recorded VPS prices every night since 12 February 2026, so we can check how still that $6.00 block really is. DigitalOcean has shown one price on every reading for all 90 of its plans, 237 readings since 12 February. Linode has held all 39 plans since 24 February, and AWS (25 plans), Hostwinds (40) and Cloudways (60) are just as flat. Vultr's series has two blemishes and neither is a Vultr price change. Ten plans differ only on our very first reading on 22 February, and the 0.5 GB plan went from $2.50 to $3.50 on 4 October because we started counting its IPv4 address.
Across the market, 163 of the 185 plans in this count that we have been reading since mid-February have shown a single price on every night, 88% of them. In August the figure was 165. The two that moved are HostArmada plans that changed on 13 October, two nights before this count, which is too soon to call a lasting change.
Where prices did move
The price moves in our VPS data since February 2026 sit at the budget and mid-market end. Since the August version of this article, Netcup's VPS line rose 40% (22 to 25 September) and IONOS raised all five VPS+ plans (18 September). Hostinger's KVM increase dates from March.
- Hostinger, 3 March 2026. KVM 4 went from $9.99 to $12.99, and apart from a few nights in early August when it flickered to $13.99, it has read $12.99 ever since. The renewal price moved first, from $24.99 to $28.99 on 27 February. We keep seeing that order: the regular rate rises before the sign-up price does.
- IONOS, 18 September 2026. Every VPS+ plan rose. VPS L+ went from $6 to $8 at signup and from $21 to $25 at its regular rate. XL+ went from $11 to $14 and from $44 to $47, and M+ from $4 to $5 and from $11 to $14. XXL+ went from $18 to $20 with its $68 regular rate unchanged, and S+ kept its $2 signup price while its regular rate went from $5 to $6. Every night since has read the new prices.
- Netcup, 22 to 25 September 2026. The G12 range was retired and replaced by G12.5 at 1.40x the price, plan for plan. VPS 1000 went from €10.37 to €14.50 and VPS 8000 from €47.95 to €67.11, both VAT-inclusive yearly-term prices. Disk sizes halved at the same time, and the x86 plans moved from NVMe to SSD: VPS 1000 went from 256 GB NVMe to 128 GB SSD.
- Contabo Cloud VDS. The dedicated-core VDS line reads about 25% higher than it did in August, for example VDS S from €31.20 to €39.20. Contabo's shared-core Cloud VPS plans, including the two that top this article, are unchanged.
- OVHcloud's two ranges. OVHcloud's 2027 range, which we have read since 11 June 2026 at one price on all 171 readings, gives each tier name less RAM than the 2026 range did: half at VPS-1, VPS-3 and VPS-4, two thirds at VPS-2. 8 GB is VPS-1 at €5.52 a month in the 2026 range and VPS-2 at €7.21 in the 2027 range, 31% more. The cheap figures for OVHcloud in this article all come from the 2026 range.
Hetzner repriced its cloud range in mid-2026 and is no longer the cheap default it was for a decade. Our own chart for it splits at 13 August 2026 for a data reason we document on the provider page, so treat the older part of that series as catalogue history rather than a clean nightly series. We went through every increase, and every host that held, in VPS price increases in 2026: who raised and who held.
For buyers this cuts both ways. At the expensive end, a price you see today will very likely still be there when you get round to migrating. The cheap end is where September happened, and it is still cheap: Netcup after its 40% increase is $1.21 per GB, about a fifth of the median. The biggest risk to your bill is still your own renewal date.
What I would actually buy
A side project or a staging box, under $10 a month. Contabo Cloud VPS 4 at $5.06 for 8 GB, or OVHcloud at $6.35 to $8.29 for 8 GB (VPS-1 2026 or VPS-2 2027) if you want a large European provider with one published price. Skip Time4VPS's $5.04 here despite it topping the 8 GB table, because it renews at $10.07 and 8 GB is not enough headroom to make the migration worth putting off.
Production WordPress or a small SaaS, 8 to 16 GB. OVHcloud VPS-3 2027 gives you 12 GB and 6 vCPU for $11.96 flat. InterServer 4 Slices is $12.00 flat for 8 GB if you want US datacentres and per-slice scaling. Hostinger KVM 4 gives you 16 GB for $12.99, the most memory per dollar of these three, but budget for $28.99 when the two-year term ends. Netcup VPS 1000 G12.5 at $16.68 including VAT is still reasonable, though after September it is no longer the automatic pick it was. Worth comparing directly: Netcup against OVHcloud and Contabo against Hostinger.
You want an API, snapshots and managed databases. DigitalOcean or Vultr at around $5 per GB. You are paying roughly 8x Contabo's 8 GB rate for the ecosystem, and for a team shipping weekly that maths usually works.
You do not want to touch a server. Cloudways at $99 for 8 GB. Expensive per gigabyte and correctly priced for what it removes from your week.
Avoid on the numbers. SiteGround's cloud tier at $12.50 per GB, and any IONOS VPS bought without first checking when its intro price ends. VPS L+ goes from $8 to $25 a month.
The full set of plans behind this analysis is browsable on our VPS hosting and cloud hosting pages, with the nightly price history attached to each provider profile. If you are still deciding whether you need any of this, when to upgrade from shared hosting is the earlier question.
Prices recorded 15 October 2026 from our nightly readings; first published 31 August 2026. EUR converted to USD at $1.15. Netcup and Godlike.Host prices include VAT, other EUR prices are net. Monthly-equivalent figures; several budget plans require a 12- or 24-month commitment to hit the advertised rate.
Mentioned Hostings
Linode (Akamai)
SiteGround
OVHcloud
Contabo
Cloudways
NameHero
DigitalOcean
Hostinger
InterServer
Time4VPS
Vultr
IONOS
Netcup
