Pricing report · 2026-08-30
We priced the dedicated VPS market on three workloads so you don't have to
Same workloads, same rules, every provider. At production scale, the spread between the cheapest and the most-expensive dedicated slice is 3×, and the gap is engineering, not luck.
Why another VPS comparison
Most VPS comparisons are feature matrices copied from marketing pages. Almost none of them tell you what a workload will actually cost, because pricing pages are full of regional multipliers, bandwidth fair-use carveouts, and "starting at" entry tiers that quietly expire after the first month.
We maintain a live comparison tool backed by a catalog of 7 dedicated providers whose rates are hand-captured from official pricing pages and auction market listings. Each row carries a provenance date (7 of them stamped). This report runs all of them through three fixed cost-model workloads and reports EUR-stripped monthly estimates. These are cost-model scenarios, not measured performance benchmarks: no latency, throughput, or availability equivalence was tested.
The headline finding
At the mid-size workload (4 vCPU / 16 GB / 10 TB), the rank-eligible providers span $21.43/mo to $199.99/mo. That's a 9.3× difference at identical spec, driven by three patterns that show up across the whole market:
- Whole-machine pricing (Hetzner Robot, OVHcloud ADVANCE) bills for the box, not the slice, and the cheapest fitting machine can still be cheap.
- Sliced dedicated (netcup RS series, BuyVM KVM slices) bills for the cores you take, with much lower entry points and noisier neighbours.
- Auction market (Hetzner Server Auction) sells last-gen hardware at sub-€40/mo for entire machines, the absolute floor.
At small-project scale the spread is even tighter (9.3×); at large scale the auction floor still anchors the cheap end while water-cooled ADVANCE-1 and ADVANCE-2 anchors the high end.
The numbers
Small web project
2 vCPU · 4 GB RAM · 3 TB bandwidth · EU
| # | Provider | Est. monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | InterServer Dedicated → head-to-head | $149.00 |
| 2 | netcup Root Server → head-to-head | €21.43 |
| 3 | Hetzner Dedicated → head-to-head | €149.00 |
| 4 | OVHcloud Advance → head-to-head | €199.99 |
| 5 | BuyVM → head-to-head | $30.00 |
See this provider head-to-head: Hetzner Dedicated vs OVHcloud Advance·netcup vs Hetzner Dedicated·BuyVM vs Hetzner Cloud (Dedicated vCPU).
Mid-size SaaS
4 vCPU · 16 GB RAM · 10 TB bandwidth · EU
| # | Provider | Est. monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | InterServer Dedicated → head-to-head | $149.00 |
| 2 | netcup Root Server → head-to-head | €21.43 |
| 3 | Hetzner Dedicated → head-to-head | €149.00 |
| 4 | OVHcloud Advance → head-to-head | €199.99 |
See this provider head-to-head: Hetzner Dedicated vs OVHcloud Advance·netcup vs Hetzner Dedicated·BuyVM vs Hetzner Cloud (Dedicated vCPU).
Large production cluster
8 vCPU · 64 GB RAM · 25 TB bandwidth · EU
| # | Provider | Est. monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | InterServer Dedicated → head-to-head | $149.00 |
| 2 | Hetzner Dedicated → head-to-head | €149.00 |
| 3 | OVHcloud Advance → head-to-head | €199.99 |
| 4 | netcup Root Server → head-to-head | €71.36 |
See this provider head-to-head: Hetzner Dedicated vs OVHcloud Advance·netcup vs Hetzner Dedicated·BuyVM vs Hetzner Cloud (Dedicated vCPU).
Method & honesty notes
- Rates captured from official pricing pages and auction listings; capture date recorded per provider row (
verified_aton every plan). - EUR-denominated providers are converted at the tool's fixed FX rate (USD-normalized for cross-region comparison).
- VAT is stripped from every figure so the report is apples-to-apples for comparison; add 19–25% at checkout depending on jurisdiction.
- Region filter: every workload uses
EUto keep the providers comparable. US-region and global providers appear in the live tool. - Originally published 2026-08-30; calculations use the catalog bundled with the current build, whose full-verification date is 2026-09-03. This is not an immutable archive of August prices. A code or prose update is not a new price verification. Consult the capture dates and provider sources below; neither this page nor the live tool guarantees today's quote.
Source trail and freshness
These links are the catalog's recorded pricing sources, not proof that every rate was rechecked today. Capture dates can be older than the catalog-wide date. Open the live /tools/vps-compare tool for the freshest data.
- Hetzner Cloud — 6 plan(s) captured; latest
verified_at: 2026-08-30. - BuyVM — 7 plan(s) captured; latest
verified_at: 2026-08-30. - Hetzner Dedicated — 4 plan(s) captured; latest
verified_at: 2026-08-30. - OVHcloud Advance — 4 plan(s) captured; latest
verified_at: 2026-08-30. - InterServer Dedicated — 5 plan(s) captured; latest
verified_at: 2026-08-30. - netcup Root Server — 4 plan(s) captured; latest
verified_at: 2026-08-30. - OVHcloud Eco (Kimsufi) — 42 plan(s) captured; latest
verified_at: 2026-09-03.
FAQ
- Why does the same workload show such a wide price range?
- Because dedicated server pricing is dominated by the cheapest fitting plan, and providers have very different entry points. Hetzner Robot and BuyVM sell below €40/mo for two-core machines; OVHcloud ADVANCE-1 starts near €115/mo. The same RAM, bandwidth and cores, very different prices — that gap is what this report measures.
- How are EUR prices converted to USD?
- We use the editorial FX hint the rest of the tools workspace uses (fixed EUR→USD rate in src/lib/fx.ts). Every rank row is in the provider's native currency; USD figures in the headline are the same conversion you'd see in the live /tools/vps-compare calculator.
- Are these prices inclusive of VAT?
- No. Every figure in the report is VAT-stripped, matching the catalog's priceIncludesVat=false. EU customers will see +19–25% VAT at checkout; the report numbers are apples-to-apples for comparison.
- Do shared-CPU plans get a fair shake?
- No. The 2026-09-04 dedicated-only hard line retired shared-vCPU recommendations; "up to X" burst ceilings cannot be honestly ranked against guaranteed cores. Every number on this page is from the dedicated class. Shared plans still appear in the live /tools/vps-compare tool if you switch the toggle.
- How do I use this with the head-to-head pair pages?
- Every pair page (hetzner-vs-ovh, netcup-vs-hetzner, buyvm-vs-hetzner) runs the same engine on the same inputs. The pair verdicts are a focused two-vendor slice of the table on this page — when the rank table moves, the pair verdicts move with it. Re-check capture dates if a verdict looks stale.
- Is this report re-verified every month?
- No. The catalog's verifiedAt is the freshest capture date across all provider rows. A code update is not a price re-verification — open the source trail at the bottom of the page to see when each rate was last checked against the provider's pricing page.