What is the cheapest vps and cloud servers in 2026?

Vultr Cloud Compute from Vultr tops this ranking at $2.50/mo. The full table below shows all 11 entries with the same measure applied to each.

Why is the cheapest option not always the right one?

Because a single axis never captures the whole bill. A provider with the lowest storage rate may have the highest egress rate; a model with the cheapest input tokens may be the most expensive for agentic work. The comparison pages model both sides against identical workloads, which is the check worth doing before switching.

Cheapest VPS and cloud servers

Entry-level virtual machines ranked by advertised monthly price. Bundled traffic varies enormously across this list, so a plan that looks $2 more expensive can be far cheaper once bandwidth is counted.

List prices checked May 2026

All 11, ranked

#	Name	Provider	Entry plan	Notes
1	Vultr Cloud Compute	Vultr	$2.50/mo	None; the $2.50 IPv6-only plan is the entry point
2	Hetzner Cloud	Hetzner	$3.79/mo	20 TB of traffic included with every server
3	DigitalOcean Droplets	DigitalOcean	$4.00/mo	500 GB to 1 TB of pooled egress per Droplet
4	IONOS Cloud Servers	IONOS	$4.00/mo	Unlimited traffic included
5	OVHcloud VPS	OVHcloud	$4.20/mo	Unmetered traffic on most VPS plans
6	Scaleway Instances	Scaleway	$4.20/mo	French-hosted compute with EU data residency, billed per second, sitting between the budget hosts and the hyperscalers on price.
7	Linode (Akamai Cloud)	Akamai	$5.00/mo	1 TB of egress included on the $5 plan
8	UpCloud	UpCloud	$5.00/mo	A Finnish host selling on MaxIOPS block storage performance, with a transfer allowance per instance and pricing close to DigitalOcean's.
9	AWS Lightsail	Amazon Web Services	$5.00/mo	Three months free on the smallest plan
10	Contabo VPS	Contabo	$5.50/mo	Unlimited traffic, throttled after 32 TB
11	DigitalOcean Kubernetes	DigitalOcean	$12.00/mo	Control plane free on the standard tier

Source: Vultr (May 2026) · Hetzner (May 2026) · DigitalOcean (August 2026) · IONOS (May 2026) · OVHcloud (May 2026) · Scaleway (May 2026). Published list prices only — committed-use discounts, regional variation, and per-request charges are not included. Not yet independently re-checked against the vendor’s page.

Questions

What is the cheapest vps and cloud servers in 2026?: Vultr Cloud Compute from Vultr tops this ranking at $2.50/mo. The full table below shows all 11 entries with the same measure applied to each.
How is this ranking calculated?: Entry-level virtual machines ranked by advertised monthly price. Bundled traffic varies enormously across this list, so a plan that looks $2 more expensive can be far cheaper once bandwidth is counted. Every figure is the provider's own published list price, linked in the source column and stamped with the month it was checked.
Why is the cheapest option not always the right one?: Because a single axis never captures the whole bill. A provider with the lowest storage rate may have the highest egress rate; a model with the cheapest input tokens may be the most expensive for agentic work. The comparison pages model both sides against identical workloads, which is the check worth doing before switching.

All 11, ranked

Questions

Other rankings