Cheapest VPS for a side project
One small always-on server for a hobby app, with traffic in the low hundreds of gigabytes.
List prices checked
How this is scored
Scored on the entry plan plus 300 GB of transfer. Providers that bundle generous traffic win here even when their sticker price is higher, which is the opposite of how these are usually ranked.
All 11, ranked for this workload
| # | Service | Provider | Cost for this workload | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Vultr Cloud Compute | Vultr | $2.50/mo all in | None; the $2.50 IPv6-only plan is the entry point |
| 2 | Hetzner Cloud | Hetzner | $3.79/mo all in | 20 TB of traffic included with every server |
| 3 | DigitalOcean Droplets | DigitalOcean | $4.00/mo all in | 500 GB to 1 TB of pooled egress per Droplet |
| 4 | IONOS Cloud Servers | IONOS | $4.00/mo all in | Unlimited traffic included |
| 5 | OVHcloud VPS | OVHcloud | $4.20/mo all in | Unmetered traffic on most VPS plans |
| 6 | Linode (Akamai Cloud) | Akamai | $5.00/mo all in | 1 TB of egress included on the $5 plan |
| 7 | UpCloud | UpCloud | $5.00/mo all in | — |
| 8 | AWS Lightsail | Amazon Web Services | $5.00/mo all in | Three months free on the smallest plan |
| 9 | Contabo VPS | Contabo | $5.50/mo all in | Unlimited traffic, throttled after 32 TB |
| 10 | Scaleway Instances | Scaleway | $7.20/mo all in | — |
| 11 | DigitalOcean Kubernetes | DigitalOcean | $15/mo all in | Control plane free on the standard tier |
Published list prices only. Rows that do not publish a rate for an axis this workload depends on are excluded rather than shown as cheap.
Questions
- Cheapest VPS for a side project in 2026?
- Vultr Cloud Compute from Vultr — $2.50/mo all in. Hetzner Cloud is second at $3.79/mo all in. This ranking is specific to the workload described above; a different usage shape reorders it.
- How is this ranking weighted?
- Scored on the entry plan plus 300 GB of transfer. Providers that bundle generous traffic win here even when their sticker price is higher, which is the opposite of how these are usually ranked.
- Why does this differ from the general cheapest list?
- Because a single price axis never describes a real workload. Ranking by headline rate answers "who is cheapest per unit"; this page answers "who is cheapest for this job", and the two orders are often very different — which is the whole reason it exists as a separate table.
- What is not accounted for?
- Committed-use discounts, regional price variation, per-request charges, support plans, and minimum retention. These are published list prices applied to one stated workload — a shortlist to price properly with the vendor, not a quotation.
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