VPS Price Per GB of RAM: 711 Plans Across 39 Hosts

A gigabyte of RAM on a virtual server costs \$0.47 per month. It also costs \$58.00 per month. Same unit, same billing period, both prices live on 31 August 2026.

We priced every plan in our database that publishes a RAM figure: 711 active VPS and cloud plans from 39 providers, EUR prices converted to USD, everything normalised to dollars per gigabyte per month. The median came out at exactly \$6.00. Half the market sits above that line, half below, and the distance between the two ends is 123x.

That spread is not a mistake, and it is not all margin either. But it is far wider than most buyers assume, and the reason it stays wide is that almost nobody prices RAM by the gigabyte when they shop. They look at the plan name and the monthly figure.

How we counted

Every number here comes from our nightly price readings, taken on 30 and 31 August 2026. The rules we applied:

• Only plans currently active and in stock, with both a price and a stated RAM figure. VPS and cloud categories, no shared hosting, no dedicated metal.
• Prices converted to USD at our stored rate for the eight EUR-billed hosts in the set (Contabo, Hetzner, Netcup, OVHcloud, Private Hosting, Diploi, Evolution Host, Time4VPS).
• Monthly-equivalent pricing. A 24-month Contabo term shows as its per-month figure, which is how the provider advertises it.
• 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 cheapest gigabyte at each host

For every provider we took its single best plan by dollars per GB, then looked up what that same plan renews at. The renewal column is where the ranking falls apart.

Below that group the numbers climb quickly. AWS Lightsail's best memory ratio is \$4.50/GB, Hetzner's cloud line \$4.67, Vultr \$5.00, DigitalOcean \$5.25. Cloudways cannot get under \$9.66 and SiteGround's cloud entry point works out at \$12.50 per GB.

Contabo taking first place surprises nobody who has shopped European VPS before. What surprises people is second place: 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.

Renewal reshuffles the whole board

Twelve of the 39 hosts charge exactly what they advertise, forever. The rest use an intro rate, and the size of the step varies enormously.

IONOS runs the steepest one in the set. VPS XL+ is the fourth cheapest gigabyte in the market at signup and drops to sixteenth once the first year ends, because \$11.00 becomes \$44.00. That is a 4x step on a plan whose specs do not change. IONOS is far from alone: InMotion Hosting moves from twelfth to twenty-first, HostArmada from ninth to seventeenth, A2 Hosting from sixteenth to twenty-second.

Movement runs the other way too. OVHcloud is fifth cheapest at signup and second cheapest at renewal. Netcup goes from seventh to third. InterServer, whose flat \$1.50 per GB looks unremarkable next to Contabo's \$0.47, climbs from fourteenth to eighth simply by not raising anything.

Contabo holds first place in both columns. So does its price, which is the entire 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

Ratios are useful for ranking. For a buying decision you want a fixed basket, so here is the same question asked concretely: what does an 8 GB server cost, and what else comes with it?

Look at the bottom four rows against the top four. Cloudways charges \$99 for a DigitalOcean droplet that DigitalOcean sells for \$48, and the \$51 difference is the managed layer: patching, staging, a control panel, support that answers. Whether that is worth 2x depends entirely 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 and less than half the storage.

Bigger boxes do not get you cheaper RAM

Standard intuition says memory gets cheaper per gigabyte as you scale up. Across the whole market that intuition is wrong.

The median barely moves from 4 GB to 64 GB, and at the top of the ladder it goes back up. Meanwhile the cheapest available rate keeps falling. Both facts are true because the volume discount is real inside certain hosts and absent at others, and the ones without it dominate the large-plan population.

Ranked by how much cheaper a provider's largest plan is per gigabyte than its smallest:

Vultr and InterServer sell memory at a perfectly linear rate. Their pricing pages are honest in a way that makes comparison shopping trivial, and it means there is zero reward for over-provisioning.

The last three rows are the interesting ones. At Kamatera, Fly.io and SiteGround, scaling up costs you more per gigabyte, not less. Fly.io's Performance tier at \$15.50 per GB against its own \$7.76 shared tier is a dedicated-vCPU premium, which is the honest explanation. It is still a price signal worth reading before you scale a Fly app upward on autopilot.

Why cheap RAM is cheap

Contabo's \$0.47 and DigitalOcean's \$5.25 are not the same product wearing different price tags. Four things account for most of the gap.

CPU allocation. Budget hosts oversubscribe cores heavily. Contabo's 96 GB plan comes with 24 shared vCPU on EPYC silicon 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. They are not selling you memory. Memory is a side effect of selling you a core.

Network. Contabo, Netcup and OVHcloud market unlimited or unmetered transfer at consumer speeds. 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 5 to 6 TB.

Support. A \$5 Contabo ticket goes into a queue. LiquidWeb answers in minutes and staffs Linux engineers around the clock. That difference is roughly half the price of a managed plan.

Recovery time when something breaks. This one never shows up in a spec table and matters more than the rest combined once you are hosting anything that earns money.

None of that makes \$12.50 per GB defensible at SiteGround. It does make \$5.25 per GB defensible at DigitalOcean if you use the API, the managed databases and the load balancers 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.

These prices barely move

We have been recording VPS prices every night since 12 February 2026, which lets us answer a question nobody else can: how stable is any of this?

Very. Of the 185 plans in this analysis that we have been reading since mid-February, 165 have shown the same price on every single nightly reading. That is 89% of the sample frozen for six and a half months.

The stability is concentrated at the top of the market. DigitalOcean has not changed a single price on any of its 90 plans since we started watching. Linode has not moved on 39 plans, AWS on 25, Hostwinds on 40, Cloudways on 60. OVHcloud's entire 41-plan catalogue has held since we picked it up on 1 April 2026.

The movers are mostly budget and mid-market hosts:

• Hostinger, 3 March 2026. KVM 4 went from \$9.99 to \$12.99 and has read \$12.99 on every night since, 133 readings through 30 August. The renewal price moved first, from \$24.99 to \$28.99 on 27 February, which is the pattern we keep seeing: the invoice rises before the storefront does.
• Netcup, 4 June 2026. VPS 8000 G12 went from about \$42 to \$55 in USD terms, roughly 24%, and has held on all 86 readings since.
• IONOS, 20 June 2026. The old VPS line was retired and replaced with the "+" range on yearly billing. Intro prices fell and renewals rose. VPS L+ has read \$6.00 renewing at \$21.00 on all 74 nights since.

Hetzner repriced its cloud range in mid-2026 and it 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.

The practical takeaway from all this stillness: a good price today will still be a good price when you get round to migrating. The risk is not that the market moves under you. The risk is your own renewal date.

What I would actually buy

Running a side project or a staging box, under \$10 a month. Contabo Cloud VPS 4 at \$5.06 for 8 GB, or OVHcloud VPS-1 at \$6.35 if you want a European provider whose price will not double. Both renew at what they advertise. Skip Time4VPS's \$5.04 here despite it topping the table, because the renewal doubles and 8 GB is not enough headroom to make the migration worth deferring.

Production WordPress or a small SaaS, 8 to 16 GB. Netcup VPS 1000 G12 at \$11.93 flat, or InterServer at \$12.00 flat if you want US datacentres and per-slice scaling. Hostinger KVM 4 gives you 16 GB for \$12.99, which is the best headroom per dollar in the set, but budget for \$28.99 when the two-year term ends. 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 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 a calendar reminder for month twelve.

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 31 August 2026 from our nightly readings. EUR converted to USD. Monthly-equivalent figures; several budget plans require a 24-month commitment to hit the advertised rate.

Originally published at hostingsift.com.