What a GB of RAM Actually Costs: Every Major VPS Provider, 2026

Updated 13 September 2026. The three Contabo rows have been rebuilt. The plan names used in the previous version, Cloud VPS 10, 20 and 30, were retired over the summer, and the prices beside them predate a July increase. Contabo now sells Cloud VPS 4, 6 and 8 at the same core and memory counts. Two other things moved with them: the term behind the headline rate went from a 12-month to a 24-month subscription, and the storage column lost its NVMe option, so the entry plan went from 75 GB NVMe or 150 GB SSD to 100 GB SSD. A first pass at this correction, published earlier the same day, read the struck-through figure on each plan card as a renewal price. It is not one, it is the pre-discount price, and that reading has been removed.

Updated 8 September 2026. Clarified that the dollar figures beside Hetzner’s euro prices are our own conversion and not what Hetzner bills a dollar account, since Hetzner publishes a separate USD rate card. Also added, the same day: the CX and CAX rows are not orderable at Hetzner right now, they are EU only, and their euro figures exclude the Primary IPv4 charge. All three are set out under What this table is not.

Every “cheapest VPS” comparison lists sticker prices next to specs and leaves you to do the division. When you actually do it, the result is not a narrow race. It is an eleven-fold spread for the same commodity.

Memory is only half of the unit cost. The other half is outbound traffic, where the spread is wider still. a terabyte costs $5 at one provider and $150 at another, and two of them never bill for it at all.

That is the same gigabyte. Not a faster one, not a more reliable one, the specification is identical. The difference is business model, billing term, and how much the provider is willing to oversubscribe.

RAM is only the compute line. Add the provider’s backup and snapshot pricing before calling a plan cheap: a 20% fee can buy two, four or seven retained restore points depending on the provider.

This page computes the number nobody publishes, explains what it does not tell you, and says plainly where the cheap end is a trap.

Every price verified 29 August 2026 against the vendor’s own pricing page, all linked below.

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The table

Sorted by cost per GB of RAM. Euro prices converted at €1 = $1.1642. That conversion is our arithmetic, not a price Hetzner charges. Hetzner publishes its own USD rate card, selectable from the currency control on its site, and a vendor USD list price is set independently rather than tracking the euro figure day by day. If you are billed in dollars, read Hetzner in dollars; the euro column here is what a euro-billed account pays and the dollar figure beside it exists only so the per-GB ranking has one unit. The rate is held fixed across the whole table rather than tracked daily. For scale: the European Central Bank’s euro reference rate for the dollar was $1.1622 on 7 September 2026, so the rate used here sits about 0.2% above the reference rate on that date. It will drift. If you are budgeting rather than ranking, apply a current rate to the euro column instead of reading the dollar column as fixed.

Sources: Contabo, Hetzner price adjustment notice, Hostinger, Vultr, DigitalOcean, Akamai Cloud.

Three things jump out.

DigitalOcean and Akamai are priced identically. $12 for 2 GB, $24 for 4 GB, at both. Two independent companies landing on the same number to the dollar across multiple tiers is a market with a settled price point, not a competitive one.

Hetzner is now on both sides of the table. CX33 at $1.24 is near the top; CCX13 at $6.26 is at the bottom, below DigitalOcean. That is the result of June’s price increases, which raised the AMD and dedicated lines by 144% and 169% while leaving the shared Intel line comparatively alone.

Hostinger appears twice, four rows apart. $1.12/GB on the promotional term, $1.87 at renewal, and its 4 GB plan goes from $1.62 to $3.00. This is why a comparison that only prints promotional pricing is not a comparison.

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What this table is not

It is not a ranking, and using it as one will cost you more than you save.

A published price is not the same as a plan you can buy. Hetzner’s cost-optimized line, which is the CX and CAX rows here and the two cheapest Hetzner entries in the table, has been showing as unavailable to order. On 8 September 2026 Hetzner’s own Cloud page carried a “Currently not available” badge on the Cost-Optimized card, and its cost-optimized page marked all eight plans, CX23, CX33, CX43, CX53, CAX11, CAX21, CAX31 and CAX41, as not available, each with the line “This product is currently unavailable. Please check back later.” and the Create button disabled. Hetzner’s stated reason on the same page is that the line runs on older hardware it already owns, so “the number of available servers is limited”. The CPX and CCX cards were not flagged. We first recorded this on 2 September and it was unchanged six days later. What is unavailable, and what the orderable substitutes cost has the detail. Read the CX and CAX rows as reference prices, not as something you can order today.

Those two Hetzner rows are also EU only. Hetzner lists the cost-optimized plans in eu-central, at Nuremberg and Helsinki. The other rows in the table are sold in more than one continent, so the ranking is mixing a regional plan with global ones.

The Hetzner euro figures here are the server price on its own. Hetzner bills the Primary IPv4 address separately at €0.50 a month, which is why a CX23 reads €5.49 here and €5.99 on Hetzner’s marketing card, where the address is folded in. Our Hetzner backups and snapshots page sets out both bases in full. If the server needs a public IPv4, add €0.50 to each Hetzner row before you compare it with anything else here.

Price per GB measures memory, not the machine. It is the right first cut for memory-bound work, databases, self-hosted apps, n8n, Ghost, anything where you run out of RAM before you run out of CPU. It is the wrong cut for CPU-bound work, and it structurally flatters shared and oversubscribed plans. Hetzner’s CCX13 looks terrible here at $6.26 because it is a dedicated vCPU plan being compared on a metric that ignores what you are paying for.

We have not benchmarked any of these. Everything on this page is arithmetic on published prices. Disk speed, CPU steal time, network consistency and support quality are not in the table, and on the cheap end of it, those are exactly the variables that differ most.

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The four things that make cheap memory expensive

1. The term is not optional

Contabo’s headline rate is tied to a term, and the term doubled this summer. The legal note under its pricing table states that “the price displayed is the effective monthly rate for a 24-month subscription including applicable taxes.” On 5 July the same line read 12-month subscription (Wayback capture 20260705090207). The minimum initial contract is one month and each following term matches the initial one, so the rate in the table is what you pay if you commit for two years rather than one.

Hostinger’s $1.12/GB requires paying 24 months up front, $215.76 for KVM 2. That is not a monthly price; it is a purchase.

Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr and Akamai are billed monthly with no term. That flexibility is worth something, and the per-GB column does not price it.

2. Tax is not treated the same way

Contabo’s figures are stated as including applicable taxes, in the legal note under its pricing table. Hetzner’s are explicitly excluding VAT. Depending on where you are and whether you have a VAT number, Hetzner’s real cost can be up to 19% above the number in the table while Contabo’s is the number. One caveat: the Including VAT and Excluding VAT labels on the plan cards themselves stay hidden until you pick a country in Contabo’s tax selector, so the cards do not tell you which one you are looking at.

Comparing an ex-VAT price to a tax-inclusive price and declaring a winner is a mistake most comparison articles make silently. This one at least tells you it is doing it.

3. Renewal is where the cheap plans go

Two of the fifteen rows above are the same plans at renewal, and both roughly double. If you plan to keep a server more than the promotional term (and most people do) the renewal row is your real price.

Notably, third-party reviews report that Contabo does not raise prices at renewal (Cybernews, updated 17 June 2026). Contabo’s own pricing page states no renewal rate either way, so we cannot confirm that from the vendor. What the page does show is that the term attached to the headline rate went from twelve months to twenty-four between July and August 2026, which doubles how long you are committed in order to get it.

4. Cheap RAM is usually shared RAM

This is the part that decides whether the top of the table is a bargain or a mistake.

A provider selling 8 GB for $5.28 is making different assumptions about how much of that machine you will actually use than one selling 2 GB for $12. Oversubscription is a legitimate business model (most of the time most VMs are idle) but it means your performance depends on your neighbours in a way the specification sheet does not disclose.

I am flagging a structural reality, not reporting a measurement. We have not tested these providers. What I can say is that a 10x price difference for an identical specification is never free, and if you cannot identify what you are giving up, you have not found the trade yet.

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What to actually buy

The honest summary: if you are buying memory, the cheap end of this table is real and the savings are large. If you are buying reliability, support and a region near your users, you are in the $5–6 tier and the per-GB number is not the metric you should be optimising.

Most people running one or two self-hosted applications are buying memory.

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What changed in 2026

Prices in this market moved more this year than in the previous three combined.

That is why every table on this page carries a verification date. A hosting comparison written in March 2026 is quoting Hetzner prices that were replaced twice before this page was published, and most of them still are. This page is re-checked quarterly, and the date at the top is the last check, not the publish date.

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Two price increases in one year moved these rankings. See which providers now undercut Hetzner.

FAQ

Is Contabo really ten times cheaper than DigitalOcean?
Per GB of RAM, yes, $0.56 against $6.00, and both figures come from the providers’ own pages. Whether the gigabyte performs the same is a different question, and one this page does not answer.

Why are DigitalOcean and Akamai identical?
Both charge $12 for 2 GB and $24 for 4 GB. We have no insight into why; the observation is just that the mainstream US cloud tier has converged on $6 per GB.

Should I use price per GB to choose?
Use it to see the shape of the market, then decide what you are buying. Memory-bound workload with tolerance for variable performance: follow the table. Client-facing production with a support relationship: do not.

Does Hetzner’s price include VAT?
No. The figures are ex-VAT, and depending on your situation VAT may add up to 19%. Contabo’s stated prices include applicable taxes. This is the single most common apples-to-oranges error in VPS comparisons.

What about the free tiers?
Oracle Cloud’s always-free ARM instances are genuinely free and generous enough to run a small stack. Capacity in the free tier is frequently unobtainable and there is no support relationship. Fine for a lab, not for something a client depends on.

How often does this page change?
It is re-checked quarterly, and immediately when a provider announces a change. Given 2026, “quarterly” has meant something.

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Every figure on this page was read off the provider’s own pricing page on 29 August 2026 and each is linked above. Euro conversions use €1 = $1.1642 on that date; the euro figures are authoritative and the dollar figures move with the rate. Contabo prices are stated by Contabo as the effective monthly rate for a 24-month subscription including applicable taxes; Hetzner prices exclude VAT. No provider was benchmarked. Where a claim comes from a third party rather than the vendor, it is attributed inline. This page links to each vendor’s own pricing page. No affiliate links are used at this time.

These are unmanaged prices. Adding management roughly doubles them, see what managed hosting charges per hour of your time.

Before you decide how many of those gigabytes to buy, it is worth knowing how many you actually use. We measured our own server: the WordPress stack used 262 MiB and about 491 MiB more was in use outside the containers, and summed per-process RSS for php-fpm read about 1.9–2× the container’s own figure.