VPS Backup Pricing Across 9 Providers (2026)

KEY FINDING. VPS backup pricing is not comparable by fee alone. A 20% add-on keeps seven daily restore points at Hetzner and under UpCloud's Week plan, four weekly points under DigitalOcean Basic Weekly, or the latest two scheduled points at Vultr. For 100 billable GB under each provider's own meter, calculated examples are $1.22 at OVHcloud Public Cloud's Worldwide rate, €1.43 at Hetzner, $5 at Vultr or AWS Lightsail, and $6 at DigitalOcean or for one UpCloud on-demand image. Currencies are not converted, and differences in compression, incremental storage, source-device size, region and retention prevent a universal cheapest ranking.

Backup is one line of a larger bill. Everything except the server prices it against domain, TLS, monitoring, transactional email and CDN for one WordPress site over a year.

Prices and product rules checked 1 Sep 2026. Figures exclude tax. USD and EUR are not converted.

This page links to each vendor's own pricing page. No affiliate links are used at this time.

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Answer in 30 seconds

The right comparison starts with the product type:

1. Automatic server backups usually cost a percentage of the VPS price or a fixed plan add-on. You are buying a schedule and a limited number of restore points.
2. Snapshots or on-demand images usually charge for stored GB. They are useful before an upgrade, but somebody or something must create and expire them.
3. Independent copies live under a different provider or administrative boundary. They protect against risks that a snapshot inside the VPS account cannot.

For unattended rollback, compare the automatic-backup table below. For a deliberate image before a risky change, compare the per-GB table. For data you cannot afford to lose, use a provider restore point and an application-aware copy outside that provider.

The biggest pricing trap is comparing a 100GB disk across rows. Hetzner and Vultr bill compressed image size, DigitalOcean can bill restorable size, Lightsail uses changed-block optimization after the first snapshot, and UpCloud meters the source storage-device size. This article therefore calculates 100 billable GB under each product's own meter, not one supposedly equivalent 100GB advertised disk.

VPS backups vs snapshots: what each term means

Automatic backup means the VPS provider creates restore points on a schedule. It may be stored on separate hardware or in another region, but it remains inside the provider's system.

Snapshot or image means a point-in-time server or disk image. It may be manual or scheduled, and retention varies by provider. Even if it survives server deletion, it can disappear with the provider account.

Independent copy means a copy controlled through a different provider, account or administrative boundary. “Off-server,” “another data center” and “another region” are useful properties, but none automatically means off-provider.

Several services here describe live images as crash-consistent or warn that disk consistency is not guaranteed. Do not assume application-consistent recovery unless the vendor documents it for your workload. A database dump plus encrypted file backup is a different layer.

VPS backup pricing at a glance: what a 20% fee buys

Four providers publish a plan equal to 20% of the server price. The retained history is not equivalent.

Restore-point count is not a durability or restore-quality score. It shows why 20% extra alone is insufficient for a buying decision. Storage placement, excluded volumes, consistency and deletion behavior still matter.

Automatic VPS backup pricing compared

The table preserves each provider's actual billing model instead of forcing unlike services into one number.

Sources: Hetzner billing FAQ, DigitalOcean Backup pricing, Vultr Automatic Backups, Akamai Backup service, Lightsail pricing, Hostinger VPS backups and Daily add-on example, Contabo Auto Backup and official price range, OVHcloud Public Cloud pricing and UpCloud pricing.

What a percentage fee means on your bill

Use this formula for percentage-based plans:

backup add-on = eligible server charge × backup percentage

A $6 server with a 20% add-on produces a $1.20 backup charge and a $7.20 server-plus-backup total. A $24 server produces $4.80 and $28.80. These are generic calculations, not provider quotes. Hetzner has a documented ambiguity over whether Primary IPv4 is inside the amount used for its live starting Backup number; our detailed Hetzner Backups vs Snapshots break-even analysis keeps both published interpretations rather than pretending an invoice was checked.

When comparing the base server too, use the current VPS price per GB of RAM table. A low RAM price can stop being low after backup, IPv4, tax and renewal costs are added.

Snapshot and image cost for 50GB and 100GB

These examples normalize only products with a public storage unit. Every result is [CALCULATED] from the linked rate.

Direct rate sources: Hetzner Cloud pricing, DigitalOcean Snapshot pricing, Vultr Snapshot FAQ, Lightsail billing FAQ, OVHcloud Public Cloud prices, UpCloud global prices and Akamai North America Images pricing.

Calculations:

monthly image cost = total billable retained GB × unit rate
OVH Worldwide example = GB × $0.0122 per GB-month

One OVHcloud 100GB image is $1.22 per month on the Worldwide English price page. Seven separately retained 100GB full images would be $8.54 if every image were billed at the full 100GB. The localized US page showed $0.0123/GB-month, or $1.23 for the same input, when checked. Do not apply that multiplication to Lightsail: AWS says successive snapshots are optimized so only changed data is added. Do not apply it to an advertised Hetzner or Vultr disk size either: both describe compressed snapshot billing.

Hostinger is absent from this per-GB table because its manual Snapshot is included as one temporary restore point and currently expires after one day. Contabo is absent because the number of included Snapshot slots varies by plan and Contabo says Snapshots are not a backup. Linode's one manual Backup-service slot is part of its plan-specific add-on; the Custom Image row is a separate durable image product.

What happens when the server is deleted

Surviving source deletion is useful, but it is still not provider independence.

If the whole provider account is suspended, compromised or deleted, an internal Snapshot may be unreachable even when it survives deletion of one server. That is the control-boundary reason for a second copy.

Offsite VPS backup cost: one independent 100GB copy

A 100GB encrypted archive in Cloudflare R2 Standard costs $1.35 per month under the assumptions below. The bucket must be under a separately controlled account to count as independent here.

Cloudflare publishes $0.015/GB-month, a monthly 10GB Standard storage allowance and free direct egress. For one 100GB archive held for the full month:

billable storage = 100GB - 10GB free allowance = 90GB
storage cost = 90GB × $0.015 = $1.35/month
one direct 100GB restore egress = $0

That $1.35 is [CALCULATED] and assumes the account's 10GB-month storage allowance and free operation allowances are otherwise unused. It excludes backup software, encryption-key handling, CPU time and any VPS-side outbound transfer used to create the copy. Read Cloudflare R2 pricing before deployment.

Wasabi's current Pay-Go price is $7.99/TB-month with a 1TB monthly minimum, so 100GB still produces a $7.99 minimum monthly storage charge. Deleting Pay-Go objects before the 90-day minimum storage duration can add timed-deleted-storage charges. Egress and API requests remain free subject to policy. See Wasabi's 2026 price notice, monthly minimum and minimum storage duration.

Uploading a full backup from the VPS can consume its outbound-transfer allowance, while restore egress depends on the storage provider. Our VPS bandwidth cost per TB comparison helps price transfer outside included allowances.

Three realistic backup stacks

1. Personal project with rebuildable data

• One automatic provider restore point set covering accidental changes.
• A weekly application export to a different provider.
• A written rebuild procedure.

The provider copy makes rollback convenient; the external export protects the irreplaceable data.

2. Small production WordPress or automation server

• Daily provider backup with a retention window matched to detection time, for example seven daily points for a one-week rollback window.
• Daily database dump plus uploaded files/configuration to independent object storage.
• Retention that includes weekly or monthly points.
• A periodic restore check on a separate server.

For self-hosted WordPress, the cost difference is often smaller than the administrator's time. See our self-hosting cost model and managed hosting versus VPS time calculation before optimizing only the storage line.

3. Change window before an upgrade

• Take a manual Snapshot immediately before the change.
• Confirm the existing scheduled backup is recent.
• Export the application database separately.
• Delete the temporary Snapshot after the rollback window if its retention is manual and billable.

This is where a Snapshot is most useful: a deliberately timed rollback point. It is not a reason to stop the independent backup schedule.

Which option fits your requirement?

If the VPS will host automation workloads, add backup costs to the current low-cost VPS comparison for n8n rather than choosing by the promotional server price alone.

Frequently asked questions

Are VPS snapshots backups?

They are one backup layer when retained and recoverable, but usually remain inside the same provider account and may not be application-consistent. A Snapshot is especially useful for fast rollback. It is not an independent copy unless it is exported to a separately controlled system.

Which provider has the cheapest VPS backups?

There is no defensible universal winner. Included weekly backups can have the lowest separate line item, while a percentage plan may become expensive on a larger VPS. Per-GB images can be cheaper for small compressed datasets, but they may require manual scheduling and retention management. Compare only within the same product class.

Does a 100GB VPS create a 100GB backup bill?

Not necessarily. Some services bill compressed stored size, some bill restorable size, some bill allocated or used image data, and some add only changed blocks after a first Snapshot. The 50GB and 100GB examples above are billable-data inputs, not advertised disk sizes.

How many restore points should a VPS keep?

The right count depends on how quickly corruption or deletion will be noticed. Seven daily points cover one week only. If a problem can remain hidden for a month, add weekly or monthly retention. Keep an independent copy for failures outside the server itself.

Do provider backups include attached volumes?

Not automatically. Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr and Linode explicitly document exclusions for attached Volume or Block Storage in the products compared here. Verify every disk and database path before assuming a full-server image includes it.

Method, limits and update policy

Method. We read each provider's official public pricing and product documentation on 1 Sep 2026. Automatic products remain in their native percentage, fixed-add-on or per-GB model. The 50GB and 100GB examples multiply the official storage unit by an explicitly assumed billable amount. For OVHcloud we used the Worldwide English page's visible $0.0122/GB-month and separately noted the localized US $0.0123 rate. Results are rounded to cents and marked [CALCULATED] in context. A link to the WordPress running costs breakdown was added on 6 September 2026; no price, table or ranking in this article changed.

Limits.

• We did not purchase every add-on, inspect invoices or restore any image.
• Prices exclude tax and may vary by billing country, account currency, region, promotion or legacy plan.
• EUR and USD are not converted.
• Compression, changed blocks and restorable size depend on workload, so an advertised 100GB disk is not a valid universal input.
• Hostinger's $6 Daily price is shown in its current US help screenshot; verify local checkout.
• Contabo publishes a range rather than every eligible-plan add-on price.
• Hetzner's 20% wording and IPv4-inclusive live starting number remain an unresolved public-source discrepancy. The detailed linked article shows both bases.
• No provider-native feature is labelled independently controlled unless an official local download route was verified.

Update policy. Recheck this page quarterly, and immediately after a provider announces a price or retention change. A changed price should update the table, calculations, verification date and change log together.

Change log.