Cheapest VPS in 2026: Hetzner vs DigitalOcean vs Vultr vs Linode

€4.50 a month against $24. That's a 2 vCPU / 4 GB cloud server at Hetzner versus the same rough spec at DigitalOcean, and it isn't a promo price or an intro rate — it's just what Hetzner charges, every month, indefinitely. Nobody else in this comparison is close.

| Provider | Monthly | Included egress | Regions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hetzner (CX22) | ~€4.50 | 20 TB | 6 |
| Vultr | ~$18 | 3 TB | 30+ |
| Linode / Akamai | ~$24 (4 GB shared) | included, generous | 20+ |
| DigitalOcean | ~$24 (Basic) | 4 TB, then $0.01/GB | 15 |

The obvious question is what the other three are charging extra for, and the honest answer is mostly region coverage. Hetzner runs six data centers — five in Europe, one in the US. DigitalOcean has fifteen, Linode over twenty, Vultr more than thirty. If your users are scattered globally and latency actually matters to them, that gap is real money's worth of infrastructure you'd otherwise have to build yourself.

Bandwidth is where the price difference compounds, and it's easy to miss on a spec sheet. Hetzner bundles in 20 TB of egress a month; DigitalOcean gives you 4 TB, then starts charging $0.01/GB. Push 10 TB through a DigitalOcean box in a given month and you're paying roughly $80 in overage on top of the base price — often more than the server itself cost. A bandwidth-heavy app (media, backups, a busy API) can make the "cheap" US options quietly expensive in a way the sticker price never warned you about.

None of this has moved much this year — pricing across the category has been stable, and the US providers have mostly competed on managed add-ons (hosted Postgres, load balancers, object storage) rather than cutting raw compute prices, which tells you where they think their real margin is.

If you're EU-based, comfortable running your own database, and bandwidth-heavy, Hetzner isn't just cheaper, it's meaningfully cheaper, and there's no real reason to pay the premium elsewhere. Reach for DigitalOcean or Linode specifically when you want managed Postgres or Redis sitting next to your compute rather than another service to operate yourself. Vultr earns its place only when you genuinely need points of presence Hetzner doesn't have — otherwise you're paying for regions you'll never route traffic through.