VPS Price Tracker: The August 2026 Baseline, and Why Hetzner Isn't Cheap Anymore
This page starts a record rather than continuing one. Everything below was read from vendors’ own pages during August 2026, with dates, and it becomes the baseline we measure future months against.
The per-gigabyte index, August 2026
The cleanest way to compare VPS plans is price divided by RAM. It isn’t perfect — see the caveats — but it exposes differences the plan names hide:
| Plan | RAM | Monthly | $/GB |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hostinger KVM 2 | 8 GB | $14.99 | $1.87 |
| Hostinger KVM 1 | 4 GB | $11.99 | $3.00 |
| UltaHost | 4 GB | $15.87 | $3.97 |
| Cloudzy | 4 GB | $17.37 | $4.34 |
| Hetzner CPX22 | 4 GB | ~$21.59 | $5.40 |
| DigitalOcean Basic | 4 GB | $24.00 | $6.00 |
| Railway (always-on) | 1 GB | $10.01 | $10.01 |
The spread across VPS providers is 3.2× — the same gigabyte costs between $1.87 and $6.00 depending on where you buy it.
And Railway, included for contrast, is 5.3× the cheapest VPS per gigabyte held continuously. That’s not a criticism of Railway — it’s what per-second residency billing costs, and it’s excellent value below about 1GB. It just isn’t a VPS price.
The finding: Hetzner is no longer the cheap option
Look at where Hetzner lands. At roughly $5.40 per gigabyte it sits second-from-top — above Cloudzy, above UltaHost, and nearly three times Hostinger’s 8GB tier.
That’s a genuine reversal. Hetzner spent a decade as the reflexive answer to “cheapest decent VPS in Europe”, and on this measure it isn’t anymore.
Two things caused it, and we’ve documented both:
1. The June 2026 repricing. We covered it in detail — the headline was a 33–38% rise on the cost-optimized lines and steeper on dedicated-vCPU.
2. The cheap tier stopped being buyable. This is the part the percentages miss. Hetzner’s own cloud page shows its Shared Resources line as “Currently not available”, and its status page has carried a “Limited availability of cloud instances” notice open since 26 June 2026 — verified when we looked at its reliability. A price you can’t purchase isn’t a price, which is why our index uses CPX22 rather than the cheaper CX line.
The editorial point for this tracker: the interesting metric isn’t any single vendor’s percentage change, it’s whether the cheap end of the market still exists. In August 2026, at the entry tier, it largely doesn’t in Europe.
Changes logged in 2026 so far
These are the changes we’ve documented with dates and sources:
| Effective | Provider | Change | Existing customers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Jan 2026 | DigitalOcean | Droplets moved to per-second billing, min 60s or $0.01 | Applies to all |
| June 2026 | Hetzner | Cloud repricing, 33–38% on cost-optimized lines | Not established |
| 26 Jun 2026 | Hetzner | “Limited availability of cloud instances” — notice still open | Affects new provisioning |
| Aug 2026 | Hostinger | Shared term now sold as 48 months, not 36 | New purchases |
DigitalOcean’s per-second billing is the one genuinely good news item here — it makes short-lived and staging servers materially cheaper, and it’s the only change in the table that moves in the customer’s favour.
The Hostinger term-length change is one we noticed by re-reading: its shared plans are now sold on a 48-month commitment where we had previously recorded 36. That’s not a price rise — it’s a longer lock-in at the promotional rate, which is a different thing and worth tracking separately from headline pricing.
Shared hosting: promotional vs renewal
The gap that matters on shared hosting isn’t between vendors, it’s between year one and year five. Read live this month:
| Provider | Promotional | Renewal | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bluehost | $3.99/mo (36-mo) | $9.99 | 2.5× |
| Hostinger Premium | $2.99/mo (48-mo) | $10.99 | 3.7× |
| Hostinger Business | $3.99/mo (48-mo) | $16.99 | 4.3× |
| DreamHost Shared Starter | $2.89 (first year) | $10.99 | 3.8× |
Every mainstream shared host does this, which is why we published the comparison when answering whether Bluehost is a scam — it isn’t, and its multiple is the smallest of the three.
On Hostinger’s 48-month Business plan, year five alone costs more than the first four combined — the arithmetic is here.
Managed database pricing, which nobody tracks
Worth logging because it frequently exceeds the server cost. From DigitalOcean’s own documentation, read 18 August 2026:
| Product | Spec | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Managed PostgreSQL, single node | 1 GiB | $15.00 |
| Managed PostgreSQL, HA | 2 GiB + standby | $30.00 |
| Additional storage | per GiB | $0.21 |
The $30 HA tier costs more than the $24 droplet running the application — and DigitalOcean’s own docs recommend the cheaper single-node tier “for preliminary development and testing”, so the production comparison is the $30 one. We worked through what that means for sizing.
How we checked this
Every figure in this article was read from the vendor’s own page, and each is dated in the source article it came from: Bluehost on 17 August 2026; Cloudways and DigitalOcean’s database pricing on 22 August; Hostinger’s shared tiers and DreamHost on 23 August; Railway, Laravel Forge and the game-host tiers on 24 August. The Hetzner status notice and its “Currently not available” label were read on 18 August.
All $/GB figures and multiples are our arithmetic on those published prices.
This is a baseline, not a history — and the brief called for a history. It specified a living dataset with old price, new price, percentage change, effective date and grandfathering status per row. We have one month of observations and four documented changes, so the changes table is thin and the grandfathering column is mostly empty because we did not verify what any provider did for existing customers. That’s a real gap and it’s the column we’d most want filled.
The per-GB index has a genuine methodological weakness. It compares plans that differ in more than memory: UltaHost’s 4GB includes 3 vCPU where others include fewer, DigitalOcean’s price buys documentation, per-second billing and a managed ecosystem, and Hetzner’s CPX line is dedicated-vCPU rather than shared. Dividing by RAM alone flatters plans that are thin on everything else. Read it as one axis, not a verdict.
The Hetzner figure is a conversion. Its CPX22 is priced at €19.99; we’ve converted at approximately 1.08 to keep the table in one currency. Exchange rates move, so that row is softer than the dollar-priced ones — and its position near the top of the index depends partly on that conversion.
The June 2026 Hetzner repricing percentages are from our earlier reporting rather than re-verified today, and we have not established what Hetzner did for existing customers at that repricing — which is exactly the kind of thing this tracker should record and currently can’t.
Four providers in this page’s remit have no logged prices at all: ScalaHosting, IONOS, Hosting.com (formerly A2) and RunPod. We have not read their current pricing, so they’re absent rather than estimated. Several vendors are also unreadable to us — Bluehost, Cloudways, Contabo, SiteGround and Namecheap all return bot-protection responses to our requests, which limits what any tracker we run can cover.
What we did not do: hold an account with any provider, verify a renewal invoice, confirm a grandfathering policy, or observe a price change as it happened.
The provider links on this page are affiliate links. The cheapest plan in the index is one we earn from, and so is the most expensive — the index is the same either way.
Where to buy at each tier
Hostinger — $1.87/GB at 8GB, the cheapest verified rate in our index, with root access and KVM virtualisation. Refund terms cover renewals, which is unusual and worth something.
DigitalOcean — the most expensive per gigabyte at $6.00, and the one where that’s most defensible: best documentation in the category, per-second billing since January, and the most granular status reporting we’ve found.
UltaHost — $3.97/GB but 3 vCPU at 4GB, more cores than most at the price. The clearest illustration of why a per-GB index is only one axis.
Cloudzy — $4.34/GB, billed monthly with no term, which is the feature rather than the price. The low-commitment way to test a provider.
ScalaHosting, IONOS, Hosting.com and RunPod — not yet logged. We have no current verified pricing for these, and they’ll be added as we read them.
FAQ
What is the cheapest VPS per gigabyte of RAM?
In our August 2026 index, Hostinger’s 8GB KVM tier at $1.87/GB. The spread across providers is 3.2×, with DigitalOcean’s 4GB Basic at $6.00/GB.
Is Hetzner still the cheapest VPS provider?
Not on this measure. At roughly $5.40/GB it sits second-from-top, after a June 2026 repricing and an ongoing shortage that has left its cheapest line unavailable since late June.
Did VPS prices go up in 2026?
At the cheap end in Europe, effectively yes — less through headline increases than through the cheapest tiers becoming unbuyable. DigitalOcean’s move to per-second billing went the other way.
What is per-second billing?
DigitalOcean moved Droplets to per-second charging on 1 January 2026, with a minimum of 60 seconds or $0.01. It makes staging and short-lived servers meaningfully cheaper.
Why compare price per gigabyte?
Because plan names hide the comparison. It’s one axis only — it ignores vCPU count, disk, network and support, so treat it as a starting point.
Do managed databases cost more than servers?
Often. DigitalOcean’s HA PostgreSQL starts at $30/month against a $24 4GB droplet, and its own docs recommend the cheaper single-node tier only for development and testing.
How often is this updated?
It’s a baseline as of August 2026. Figures are dated so you can see how stale any row is, and vendors we can’t currently read are named rather than estimated.
