Cheap VPS: what you really get for €2 to €10 a month

"Cheap VPS" is one of the most searched terms in our category, and rightly so: for the price of one month of game server you can run a small Linux box for six months. But the cheapest package isn't always the cheapest for your purpose. In this article we walk through what you get from us for €2 to €10 a month, what runs happily on it, where cheap VPSes in general cut corners, and how to check in five minutes after ordering whether you got what it said on the box.

What's in a €2 VPS?

Our budget VPS starts at €2.00 per month for the HEN-B-01: 2 vCores on an Intel Xeon E5-2699 v3, 1 GB of DDR4 memory, 10 GB of NVMe storage, a 1 Gbit/s connection and DDoS protection. For €2.90 (HEN-B-02) you get 2 GB and 20 GB, for €4.50 (HEN-B-03) 4 GB and 40 GB, and the ladder carries on up to 32 GB for €25.70. Backups are included, you set your own rDNS and everything can be cancelled monthly. The processor is the honest story behind that price: the E5-2699 v3 is an older server CPU with lots of cores at 2.3 GHz. Reliable, but not fast per core.

Alongside it sits the Normal line, on an AMD EPYC 7443P that clocks up to 4.0 GHz: HEN-N-01 with 2 vCores, 2 GB and 40 GB for €3.40, HEN-N-02 with 4 GB and 60 GB for €5.30, and HEN-N-03 with 4 vCores, 8 GB and 80 GB for €9.50. So the difference isn't in memory or storage per euro, but in how much work a single core gets through per second.

What runs fine on 1 or 2 GB

• A Discord bot. A Node.js or Python bot uses 100 to 300 MB. Even on the smallest VPS you have room for two or three.
• A monitoring tool or status page for your game servers.
• A VPN endpoint (WireGuard) or your own DNS filter.
• A small website with a static site generator or a light CMS without much traffic.
• A voice server or helper program next to your game server, such as a proximity voice server for Minecraft Bedrock.
• A TeamSpeak or Mumble server for your clan.

What they have in common: they spend most of their time waiting. For that, a shared core on an older processor is exactly good enough, and you aren't paying for clock speed you don't use.

What you're better off not putting on a €2 VPS

A Minecraft server. Not because it can't be done (it will start on 2 GB), but because it doesn't add up: Minecraft runs on one core and wants a fast one, and 1 to 2 GB is too tight as soon as there are more than three players. A Minecraft game server with us starts at €0.50 and costs about €1.10 per GB, including panel, backups and protection on the game ports. That is cheaper and better than a VPS for the same purpose. The same goes for FiveM, Palworld and other games: there, the game server is the right product. Databases with real traffic, build servers and anything that has to "just quickly" crunch some numbers also belong on the Normal line or a bigger machine.

Where cheap VPSes cut corners

These are the places a low price comes from, with us and with everyone else. Once you know them, you read every offer differently:

1. Clock speed and age of the CPU. Older servers have been written off; that's why a vCore on such a machine can be dirt cheap. For waiting workloads that doesn't matter, for number crunching it does.
2. Shared cores. A vCore is a share of a physical core, not a whole core. As soon as your neighbours get busy, you notice it as "steal time". With us the ratio is set so that this rarely happens, but no budget line guarantees a hundred percent; that's what the VDS is for.
3. Storage type. "SSD" says little. NVMe is standard with us; at some providers a budget VPS still runs on SATA SSD or even on hard disks.
4. Bandwidth and data transfer. Watch out for a limit in terabytes per month and for what happens when you go over it. With us, fair use applies at 1 Gbit/s.
5. DDoS protection and backups. Often a paid extra. With us both are included in the price; check that in every comparison, because it quickly adds up to a few euros a month.
6. IPv4 address. A dedicated IPv4 address costs providers more and more. Some budget VPSes only come with IPv6 or a shared address, which doesn't work for game servers and a lot of software. All our VPSes have their own IPv4.

Check what you bought in five minutes

Log in via SSH and run these commands; they work on any Linux VPS:

nproc                 # number of vCores
lscpu | grep 'Model name'   # which processor
free -m               # memory in MB
df -h /               # disk space
top -bn1 | head -5    # look for 'st' (steal time): should stay near 0
curl -s ifconfig.me   # your public IPv4

If nproc is right, the memory matches your order and steal time stays below a few percent while you run something, then you got what you paid for. How to connect is in the knowledge base: connecting via SSH; there you can also read how to view your VPS usage in the panel.

Which one should you pick?

If you're torn between budget and normal: go normal as soon as your program has to do noticeable computing (compilers, a game server, a busy database) and budget if it mainly has to exist and respond. Both lines run on our own hardware in the Previder data centre in Hengelo, with NVMe storage and DDoS protection, and you can scale up or down monthly. What a VPS actually is and when you need one is explained in What is a VPS?.

Further reading

• What is a VPS and when do you need one?
• KVM VPS: your own kernel, Windows and when you need it
• VPS or game server: what do you actually need?