How cheap can VPS hosting get?
You can find VPS hosting for $2-5 per month. Some providers even offer free tiers. At those prices, you might wonder why anyone pays more.
The answer: quality isn’t cheap, and cheap isn’t always a bargain.
What gets cut to hit rock-bottom prices
When a VPS costs less than a cup of coffee, something has to give. Here’s what budget providers typically sacrifice:
Oversold servers
The cheapest way to lower prices is to pack more VPS instances onto each physical server than the hardware can comfortably handle. Your “4 GB RAM” VPS might compete with dozens of other customers for actual resources.
This works fine when everyone’s idle. When multiple VPS instances get busy simultaneously, everyone slows down.
Consumer-grade hardware
Enterprise SSDs cost more than consumer drives. ECC memory costs more than standard RAM. Redundant power supplies cost more than single units. Budget providers often use whatever’s cheapest.
The result: more failures, more downtime, and occasionally, data loss.
Minimal support
24/7 support from engineers who understand the platform is expensive. Budget providers often offer:
- Email-only support with multi-day response times
- Outsourced call centers reading from scripts
- “Community support” forums where customers help each other
- Documentation and nothing else
When something breaks, you’re largely on your own.
Network compromises
Quality bandwidth from multiple upstream providers costs money. Budget hosts might use:
- Single upstream connections (single point of failure)
- Bandwidth caps or throttling
- No DDoS protection, or minimal protection that fails under real attacks
- Congested networks during peak hours
No investment in monitoring
Careful monitoring of hypervisors, proactive hardware replacement, and maintaining resource headroom all cost money. Budget providers often run servers until they fail rather than replacing components proactively.
The hidden costs of cheap hosting
The monthly price doesn’t tell the whole story. Consider:
Downtime costs
If your VPS goes down and support takes 48 hours to respond, what does that cost your business? Lost sales, frustrated customers, damaged reputation.
Your time
Hours spent troubleshooting problems that shouldn’t exist, or migrating away from a failing provider, have real value.
Recovery from data loss
Consumer-grade drives fail more often. Without proper backups (often an extra cost at budget providers), you might lose everything.
The eventual migration
Many people start with the cheapest option, hit its limits, and migrate elsewhere. That migration has costs: time, potential downtime, and the learning curve of a new platform.
When a small VPS makes sense
Not every project needs a large server. Smaller, affordable VPS plans work well for:
- Learning and experimentation: If you’re learning Linux or testing ideas
- Non-critical projects: Personal blogs, hobby projects, development environments
- Short-term needs: Temporary servers for specific tasks
- Lightweight applications: Simple websites, small APIs, monitoring tools
The key is choosing a provider that doesn’t compromise on infrastructure quality just because the plan is small. At ServerPoint, our smallest VPS plans run on the same quality hardware, network, and support as our larger plans.
Our approach: quality at reasonable prices
We’re not the cheapest VPS provider. That’s not our goal.
Our goal is high-end infrastructure at reasonable pricing. We use quality components (Supermicro servers, Samsung enterprise NVMe SSDs), maintain proper resource headroom, and staff in-house teams who actually understand our platform.
This costs more than the bare minimum, and our prices reflect that.
No private equity, no investors
ServerPoint isn’t backed by private equity or venture capital. There are no investors over our shoulders demanding price increases or cost cuts that compromise quality.
We set prices based on what it costs to run infrastructure properly, plus a reasonable margin. When our costs don’t increase, neither do your prices.
Many hosting companies have been acquired by private equity firms who immediately raise prices, cut staff, and squeeze customers. We’ve seen what happens to those companies and their customers. That’s not how we operate.
What you get for the price
When you pay for ServerPoint VPS hosting, you’re paying for:
- Hardware we own: Supermicro servers, Samsung enterprise NVMe drives, quality networking equipment
- Network we control: Multi-homed connectivity, included DDoS protection
- Support from our team: A dedicated in-house support team, not outsourced call centers
- Proper resource allocation: We monitor hypervisors and maintain CPU headroom
- Infrastructure investment: We replace hardware proactively, not when it fails
Questions to ask about any “cheap” VPS
Before choosing based on price alone:
- What’s the support model? Try contacting support before signing up. See how long it takes and who responds.
- What hardware do they use? Vague answers like “fast SSD storage” often hide consumer-grade components.
- What’s their oversubscription policy? Some providers are transparent about this. Many aren’t.
- Check their ownership: Has the company been acquired recently? Private equity ownership often precedes price increases and quality decline.
The bottom line
Cheap VPS hosting exists, and it serves a purpose. For learning, testing, and non-critical workloads, it can make sense.
For production workloads where reliability matters, the cheapest option rarely turns out to be the most economical choice when you factor in downtime, support quality, and your own time.
We believe in reasonable pricing for quality infrastructure - not racing to the bottom, and not premium pricing just because we can. Somewhere in between is where hosting should be.
View ServerPoint VPS pricing - quality infrastructure at reasonable prices.