VPS Price Per GB of RAM: The Metric No Provider Publishes

RAM is the spec that decides whether a VPS runs your workload. It’s also the one providers price most inconsistently, because plan names and bundled extras make direct comparison hard on purpose.

Divide the monthly price by the gigabytes and the market sorts itself out immediately.

The league table

Steady-state prices — renewal rates, not introductory ones — in USD, August 2026. Euro figures converted at approximately 1.08.

† Currently showing as not available on Hetzner’s own cost-optimized page. ‡ Managed hosting with a control panel, not a comparable product — see below.

Among plans you can actually buy today, unmanaged, the spread is 3.8× — $1.56/GB at Hostinger’s KVM 8 against $6.00/GB at DigitalOcean, for RAM that does exactly the same thing. Include managed hosting and it’s 15×.

The three things this table gets wrong

Price per gigabyte is the right filter to start with and the wrong one to finish with. Here’s where it misleads.

1. It ignores vCPU entirely, and the two metrics disagree

Look at the last column against the middle one. Hostinger’s KVM 1 is $3.00/GB — good — and $11.99/vCPU, the worst on the table. It’s a single core. IONOS’s VPS M+ is slightly worse per gigabyte at $2.75 and dramatically better per core at $2.75/vCPU, because it gives you four.

If your workload is memory-bound — a database, an n8n instance, an AI agent holding context — buy the RAM column. If it’s CPU-bound — builds, transcoding, anything compiling — the RAM column is actively misleading and IONOS’s plans look completely different.

Most people should weight RAM, because running out of memory kills the process while running short of CPU merely slows it. But “most” isn’t “all”, and a 1-vCPU box will disappoint you in ways a slow one won’t.

2. Cheapest-per-GB is sometimes unavailable

Hetzner’s CX33 tops this table at $1.21/GB. You very likely cannot buy it.

Hetzner’s cost-optimized CX and CAX tiers were showing as not available across the board when we checked, which the company attributes to running that tier on proven older hardware in limited quantity. The plans you can buy — the AMD CPX line — sit near the bottom of the table at $4.86–5.40/GB, after a repricing on 15 June 2026 that raised CPX rates by as much as 2.75×.

So Hetzner occupies both ends of this table simultaneously, and which one applies to you depends entirely on stock. A league table that ignores availability is a fiction, which is why both rows are marked.

3. Managed hosting isn’t in the same category

ScalaHosting at $10–18/GB looks catastrophic here and isn’t. Those plans include SPanel, managed updates, and support that does things rather than pointing at documentation. You’re buying labour, not memory.

The honest reading is that ScalaHosting shouldn’t be in this table at all — we’ve included it to show the size of the distortion. Comparing managed and unmanaged hosting per gigabyte is like comparing a restaurant to a supermarket per calorie. If you want the price of the underlying resource, look at the unmanaged rows; if you want someone to run it, the per-gigabyte figure is answering a question you didn’t ask.

The renewal trap distorts it further

Every promotional rate in this market has a different shape, and comparing headline prices compares nothing.

IONOS is the sharpest example. Its VPS M+ advertises $4/month — for the first three months, on a one-year contract, then renews at $11. That’s a 2.75× step-up after a quarter. At $4 it would sit at $1.00/GB and top this table; at $11 it’s mid-field. The table above uses $11.

UltaHost requires a 24-month term for its 40% discount — but unusually, the discounted rate is also the renewal rate: its plan cards read “Renews at $5.52/mo for 2 years. Cancel anytime,” matching the promotional price rather than stepping up from it. The struck-through figures are list prices, not renewals.

Hostinger’s promotional rates need long prepaid terms and roughly double at renewal — we broke that down in Hostinger renewal pricing, where the unusual finding is that its longest term genuinely is cheapest. ScalaHosting’s introductory discounts are the steepest here at 45–61%, with Build #1 going from $29.95 to $54.95. It does pair those discounts with an anytime unconditional money-back guarantee, a materially better exit term than the fixed 30-day windows most of this market offers.

Every figure in the league table is the renewal rate, which is why it looks less exciting than any provider’s homepage. That’s the point.

Bandwidth is the other axis entirely

Price per gigabyte of RAM says nothing about price per gigabyte of traffic, and for bandwidth-heavy workloads that second number dwarfs the first — AWS charges about $92 per terabyte of egress against roughly €1 at Hetzner. If your app moves data rather than holding it, start there.

What the table can’t tell you

Two things I want to be straight about, because this is presented as a data asset and its limits matter as much as its contents.

We have not measured steal time. Shared vCPUs are shared — how much of your allocated core you actually get under sustained load depends on the host’s overcommit ratio and your neighbours, and it varies between providers in ways no pricing page discloses. A $1.56/GB plan with heavy contention can be worse value than a $3.00/GB plan with none. Establishing that requires running sustained benchmarks across every provider over time, which we haven’t done. Nobody publishing a per-gigabyte table has, including the ones who imply otherwise.

Bandwidth allowances vary enormously and aren’t in the table. Hostinger includes 4TB to 32TB scaling with plan; IONOS and UltaHost advertise unlimited traffic; DigitalOcean gives 4–5TB; ScalaHosting is unmetered. For most workloads this never binds. For anything media-heavy it can dominate the bill, and a cheap per-gigabyte plan with a tight transfer cap is a trap.

Treat the table as the first filter. Shortlist three, then compare them on the axis your workload actually cares about.

The providers

Hetzner has the best hardware per euro in this market when its CX tier is in stock — $1.21/GB would lead the table. Check availability before planning around it, because the CPX line you’d fall back to is three times that.

Hostinger wins the per-gigabyte ranking among plans you can actually buy today, at every tier from 8GB up. Its weakness is cores: the entry KVM 1 gives one vCPU, so size up if anything you run is CPU-bound rather than memory-bound.

DigitalOcean is the most expensive unmanaged option here at a flat $6.00/GB across tiers, and it’s the reference platform for a reason — documentation, predictable APIs and a decade of answers to your problem already written. That premium is real and some people should pay it. Its tracked link isn’t working on our end, so we’ve named it without linking.

UltaHost sits mid-table at $3.45–3.97/GB with generous core counts. Confirm the plan specs and the renewal figure in writing before committing — we’ve consistently found its published numbers harder to pin down than its marketing implies, and the figures we could extract were internally inconsistent.

Cloudzy is priced above the mid-field per gigabyte, and its case is billing rather than price: month-to-month with no term, which means no prepaid remainder to forfeit if you leave. That’s worth real money when switching.

Hosting.com, formerly A2 Hosting, and ScalaHosting both sit at the managed end. ScalaHosting’s per-gigabyte figures above should be read as the cost of a managed product rather than a memory price.

IONOS is the best value per vCPU on this page by a distance — four cores on a 4GB plan at $2.75 each. Its three-month promotional window is the shortest here, so budget the $11 rather than the $4.

If you want the cheap end specifically, cheapest VPS hosting ranks on price rather than normalised value.

How we checked this

All specifications and prices are the providers’ own published figures, read in August 2026: Hostinger’s KVM plans and renewal rates, IONOS’s VPS+ plans with both promotional and renewal figures, ScalaHosting’s managed cloud builds with introductory and renewal pricing, UltaHost’s VPS plans, Cloudzy’s monthly-billed rates, DigitalOcean’s Basic Droplets, and Hetzner’s CX/CAX and CPX plan data.

Every row uses the steady-state price — the renewal or standard rate rather than an introductory one — because that’s the number you pay for all but the first few months. Where a provider publishes only a promotional rate we’ve used the renewal figure it discloses alongside. Euro prices are converted at approximately 1.08 and Hetzner’s displayed figures include its €0.50/month primary IPv4 charge.

The Hetzner CX and CAX unavailability, and the 15 June 2026 CPX repricing of up to 2.75×, are documented in our analysis of that change.

On UltaHost specifically: our first read of its pricing produced a “regular price” and a “renewal” price that appeared to contradict each other, and we had flagged its figures as unreliable. Capturing the page resolved it: the struck-through number is a list price, and each plan card states the discounted rate is what renews, on the “2 Years −40%” term selected by default. Its rows use that rate, which is both the promotional and the renewal price — an unusually straightforward structure for this market.

What we did not do, and it matters. We have not benchmarked any of these providers — no steal-time measurement, no sustained-load testing, no disk I/O comparison. The brief for this article asked for a re-ranking that accounted for measured steal time under load, and we have not produced that, because we did not measure it and will not estimate it. A table of invented contention figures would be worse than no table. What we’ve done instead is set out the published variables that a per-gigabyte figure omits — core counts, core dedication, bandwidth, availability and managed-versus-unmanaged — so you can weight them yourself.

We also haven’t verified Hosting.com’s VPS pricing, as its VPS page returned a 404 to us, so it’s named above without figures.

The provider links above are affiliate links. The table is sorted by price per gigabyte, not by what we earn, and the provider at the bottom of it is one we’re paid to recommend.

FAQ

What is a good price per GB of RAM for a VPS?

Below about $2.00/GB is genuinely good, $2–4 is normal, and above $5 you should be getting something specific in return — dedicated cores, managed support, or a platform you value. The best available unmanaged rate we found was $1.56/GB.

Which VPS has the lowest price per GB of RAM?

Hetzner’s CX33 at $1.21/GB, if you can get one — that tier was showing as unavailable when we checked. Among plans you can actually buy, Hostinger’s KVM 8 at $1.56/GB leads, and its 8GB and 16GB tiers are close behind.

Is price per GB of RAM the right way to compare VPS plans?

It’s the best starting filter, because memory is what usually determines whether your workload runs at all. It ignores core count, core contention, bandwidth and availability, so use it to build a shortlist rather than to pick a winner.

Why is DigitalOcean so much more expensive per GB?

A flat $6.00/GB buys documentation, API stability and an enormous body of existing answers to operational problems. Whether that’s worth roughly four times Hostinger’s rate depends on how much time you’d otherwise spend solving things yourself.

Does more vCPU matter more than more RAM?

Usually not. Running out of memory terminates your process; running short of CPU slows it down. Weight RAM unless you know your workload is CPU-bound — and note the two metrics genuinely disagree, with Hostinger leading on RAM and IONOS on cores.

Are cheap VPS providers slower?

They can be, and price per gigabyte won’t tell you. Shared vCPUs are contended, and how much of your core you actually get varies by provider and by neighbour. We haven’t measured it, and we’d treat anyone quoting precise contention figures without published methodology with suspicion.

Why did Hetzner get more expensive?

It repriced its shared AMD CPX line upward by as much as 2.75× on 15 June 2026, without grandfathering existing subscriptions. Its cheaper CX tier rose far less but has been showing as unavailable.