Budget VPS providers compared: Contabo, Vultr and Scaleway

A budget VPS gives you a whole virtual server for a few dollars a month, as long as you are willing to run it yourself. We compared the cheapest general-purpose servers from Contabo, Vultr, Kamatera, Akamai Cloud (formerly Linode), Scaleway and OVHcloud, using each provider’s own pricing and documentation, with attention to regions in India and Singapore. We did not benchmark the servers.

Prices are as shown on the providers’ pages. Some pages localise prices: Contabo showed US dollars including 18% Indian GST to us, OVHcloud showed US dollars excluding tax, and Scaleway’s pricing page is in euros.

Sources checked on 1 November 2026. Availability and prices can change; confirm the linked primary sources before acting.

Cheapest servers compared

Provider	Cheapest plan	Specification	Price	Billing
Contabo	Cloud VPS 4	4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 100 GB SSD, unlimited traffic at 200 Mbit/s (fair use)	$7.79 a month on 1 month, $6.23 a month on 24 months including 18% GST; about $6.60 and $5.28 before tax	Monthly, minimum 1 month; a one-time setup fee on monthly contracts, none on longer terms
Vultr	Regular Performance	1 vCPU, 0.5 GB RAM, 10 GB, 0.5 TB bandwidth	$2.50 a month IPv6-only (New Jersey and Atlanta only); $3.50 with IPv4 (New Jersey only); 1 GB plan with 25 GB, $5, in many more locations	Hourly
Kamatera	Basic	1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 20 GB NVMe, 5 TB traffic	$4 a month	Hourly servers billed by the minute; no long-term contract
Akamai Cloud	Nanode 1 GB	1 CPU, 1 GB RAM, 25 GB, 1 TB transfer	$5 a month ($0.0075 an hour) in North America; some regions differ	Hourly, capped at the monthly price
Scaleway	STARDUST1-S	1 shared vCPU, 1 GiB RAM; storage billed separately; 100 Mb/s	About €0.43 a month (€0.0006 an hour); DEV1-S with 2 vCPU and 2 GB about €6.55	Hourly
OVHcloud	VPS-1	2 vCores, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe, 500 Mbit/s	$5.35 a month without commitment; $4.54 a month on 12 months (excluding tax)	Monthly, with optional 6- or 12-month commitment

The headline prices hide different trade-offs: Contabo gives the most memory and disk for the money on a monthly contract, while Vultr, Kamatera, Akamai and Scaleway bill hourly, which suits short-lived test servers.

Traffic, regions, backups and IPv4

Provider	Extra traffic	India / Singapore	Backups	IPv4
Contabo	Unlimited under fair use; may be throttled	Both offered at extra cost: India $3.54 a month, Singapore $3.66 including GST (Singapore was out of stock on 17 October; the surcharges were last seen then)	1 snapshot included; Auto Backup $2.36 a month including GST	1 included
Vultr	$0.01 per GB over the allowance	Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi NCR and Singapore	Automatic backups add 20% to the server price; snapshots $0.05 per GB a month	Included except on the IPv6-only plan
Kamatera	$0.01 per GB; inbound billed too if it exceeds a third of traffic	Singapore; no India region listed	Optional daily backup (price not shown)	Not stated on the pricing page
Akamai Cloud	$0.005 per GB	Chennai, Mumbai and Singapore	From $2 a month for shared instances	1 included
Scaleway	Egress is included in the list price	No; European regions only (Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Milan, Stockholm)	Snapshots billed per GB	Extra (flexible IPv4 billed separately); IPv6 free
OVHcloud	Unlimited in Europe; 500 GB a month in Asia-Pacific, then limited to 10 Mbit/s	Mumbai and Singapore (only Singapore available when checked)	Daily backup included free	Included

For users in India, Vultr and Akamai have Indian data centres in their standard lists, Contabo charges a regional surcharge, and OVHcloud’s Asia-Pacific servers come with a traffic quota. Scaleway is a European choice.

Support and guarantees

All six sell unmanaged servers: you install updates, secure the system and handle backups. Kamatera offers optional management and a 30-day free trial worth up to $100 on one server, with a 99.9% uptime SLA. Vultr’s SLA promises 100% availability of its network and hosts. Akamai refunds in full within the first 7 days. OVHcloud states a 99.9% SLA and includes daily backups. Check support channels on the cheapest plans before you rely on them.

Which budget VPS suits which use

Most RAM and disk for a fixed monthly price: Contabo or OVHcloud, accepting monthly or longer terms.

Short test servers and Indian regions: Vultr or Akamai, billed hourly, with data centres in India. Vultr’s cheapest two plans are US-only, so budget from its $5 plan for an Indian region.

A small European project: Scaleway’s tiny instances cost very little, with IPv4 billed separately.

Before you move a production app, read our guides to choosing a VPS, PaaS or containers and zero-downtime deployments on a single VPS.

Sources and further reading

• VPS, configurator — Contabo
• pricing, regions, SLA — Vultr
• pricing, data centres — Kamatera
• compute pricing, choosing a data centre, billing — Akamai
• Instances pricing — Scaleway
• VPS — OVHcloud

Image credits

Featured layout and explanatory diagrams: Cloudsoft Zone, CC BY-SA 4.0. No product logos or screenshots are used.