Base plan plus a terabyte of traffic, per month
Adding a terabyte of traffic moves 6 of the 9 providers in the ranking. The cheapest plan is not the cheapest bill.
Cheapest plan with at least 4 GB RAM per provider, plus the cost of 1 TB of outbound traffic per month, stacked. This reorders the ranking against base price alone, which is the point: a plan that looks cheap can carry the dearer bill.
| Provider | Plan | Base | 1 TB egress | Total / mo | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OVHcloud | VPS-1 2027 | EUR 3.81 | EUR 0.00 | EUR 3.81 | pricing |
| Hetzner | CX23 (Cost-Optimized) | EUR 5.99 | EUR 0.00 | EUR 5.99 | pricing |
| Vultr | Cloud Compute | EUR 17.43 | EUR 0.00 | EUR 17.43 | pricing |
| DigitalOcean | Basic Droplet | EUR 20.92 | EUR 0.00 | EUR 20.92 | pricing |
| Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) | Linode 4 GB | EUR 20.92 | EUR 0.00 | EUR 20.92 | pricing |
| Scaleway | DEV1-L | EUR 31.27 | EUR 0.00 | EUR 31.27 | pricing |
| Amazon Web Services (AWS) | Amazon EC2 t4g.small | EUR 12.22 | EUR 70.61 | EUR 82.83 | pricing |
| Microsoft Azure | Azure Virtual Machines B2ls v2 (Standard_B2ls_v2) | EUR 30.79 | EUR 68.25 | EUR 99.04 | pricing |
| Google Cloud | Compute Engine e2-small | EUR 11.73 | EUR 97.42 | EUR 109.15 | pricing |
The rest of the bill
Total cost is the first question, not the only one. Each of these is a separate way the advertised number and the invoice come apart.
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Cost per GB of RAM
The same gigabyte of RAM costs 8.1 times more at Azure than at OVHcloud: EUR 7.70 against EUR 0.95 a month.
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What outbound traffic costs
6 of 9 providers carry 1 TB of outbound traffic at no extra charge. The same terabyte costs USD 111.76 at Google.
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What happens in year two
The steepest renewal here multiplies the bill by 5.3 once the introductory rate ends: SiteGround, StartUp.
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Which law a provider answers to
13 of the 21 providers checked have a US entity in the contracting or ownership chain. 6 have published a sovereignty disclosure we could locate.
Where the numbers come from
Every figure carries the date it was captured and links to the provider's own page. Prices for Akamai, Vultr, Scaleway and Microsoft Azure refresh daily from those providers' public pricing APIs; the rest are dated manual captures, and each figure says which it is. A failed refresh keeps the previous value and marks it stale rather than blanking it.
Where a value could not be established the page says so. A blank is never rendered as a zero, and a provider whose figures could not be obtained never ranks first by virtue of being undocumented. If something here is wrong, open an issue with the provider, the figure, and a link to the page that contradicts it.