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How to calculate your cloud hosting cost per month (2026)

Some prices quoted in this guide are out of date. It is being rebuilt on our price index; for current prices use the comparison pages, which show when each price was checked.

The sticker price on a VPS plan is only the base fee. The real monthly cost for a running production application is the base fee plus four line items that every provider bills separately: bandwidth overage, backups, snapshots, and any managed services you add. This guide gives you the formula, then walks through three worked examples so you can copy-paste the arithmetic for your own workload.

Prices compared with provider pricing pages on 2026-09-22.

The formula

Total monthly cost = Base plan + Bandwidth overage + Backups + Snapshots + Managed services

Each of the last four is zero for many workloads. If you know the shape of your traffic, you can predict which will be non-zero for you.

Base plan

The advertised monthly on-demand price. This is what you already see on the provider's pricing page. Verified figures for the 10 providers we track are at /compare.

Bandwidth overage

Every provider bundles some monthly outbound transfer with the base plan. If you exceed it, the overage rate kicks in:

Provider Included transfer Overage rate
DigitalOcean 1-5 TB per plan $0.01/GB
Vultr 1-4 TB per plan $0.01/GB
Hetzner 20 TB per plan (EU/US) €1/TB ≈ $1.08/TB
Akamai/Linode 1-5 TB per plan $0.005-0.01/GB
AWS Lightsail 1-5 TB per plan $0.09/GB (US), $0.14/GB (Asia)
OVHcloud unmetered¹ throttled to port speed
UpCloud metered from first byte $0.056/GB
Contabo unmetered¹ throttled ~200 Mbps

¹ "Unmetered" here means unbilled, not unthrottled. Both providers shape traffic under sustained heavy load.

AWS Lightsail's overage rate is the most dangerous line item on this table. At $0.09/GB in US regions, an accidental hot-linked image gone viral has generated four-figure monthly bills. Cap AWS Lightsail bandwidth with CloudFront in front of it if you can't reason confidently about your egress.

Hetzner's per-TB pricing is the friendliest. A 100 GB overage costs you 10 cents. Same 100 GB on Lightsail is $9. Same on DigitalOcean is $1.

Backups

Automated backups are almost always billed separately from the base plan. Rates:

Provider Backup cost
DigitalOcean 20% of base plan (Basic Droplet)
Vultr 20% of base plan
Hetzner 20% of base plan
Akamai/Linode 25% of base plan
AWS Lightsail not included; snapshot-based, priced per GB
Cloudways included on the base plan
Kinsta included on the base plan

For a $24/mo DigitalOcean Basic 4 GB, backups add $4.80/mo — a real 20% uplift. For Cloudways and Kinsta, backups are already priced in and account for part of the "managed" premium.

Snapshots

One-off point-in-time captures. Usually cheaper than backups but priced per GB-month of storage:

Provider Snapshot cost
DigitalOcean $0.06/GB/mo
Vultr $0.06/GB/mo
Hetzner $0.011/GB/mo
Akamai/Linode free (up to plan limit)

If you take one snapshot per month of an 80 GB storage plan on DO: $4.80/mo. On Hetzner: $0.88/mo.

Managed services (databases, load balancers, object storage)

The single biggest variable. If your app needs a managed Postgres, that's:

Managed Postgres Entry monthly cost
DigitalOcean Managed Database (1 vCPU / 1 GB) $15/mo
Vultr Managed Database (1 vCPU / 1 GB) $15/mo
Linode Managed Database (1 vCPU / 1 GB) $60/mo
AWS RDS Postgres (db.t3.micro) $17/mo (before storage and I/O)

Managed database can easily be 50-100% of your VPS bill. For a bootstrapped project, running Postgres on the same VPS as your app is a legitimate cost-saving choice. Managed database matters when you want automatic failover, point-in-time recovery, and 24/7 monitoring — none of which are free on self-managed.

Load balancers: DO $12/mo, Vultr $10/mo, Hetzner €5.83/mo (~$6.30). Not always needed for a single-instance app.

Object storage (S3-compatible): usually pay-as-you-go and low. DO Spaces $5/mo for 250 GB + 1 TB transfer; Backblaze B2 much cheaper still.

Worked example 1: Small SaaS on DigitalOcean

A small SaaS with a Rails backend, a Postgres database, 30 signups a day, and light image uploads.

  • Base: DO Basic 4 GB ($24/mo).
  • Bandwidth: 4 TB included; actual usage ~500 GB. Overage: $0.
  • Backups: $4.80/mo (20% of base).
  • Snapshots: none.
  • Managed Postgres: DO Managed Database 1 GB ($15/mo).
  • Load balancer: none (single instance).
  • Object storage: DO Spaces for image uploads ($5/mo).

Total: $48.80/mo. The $24 sticker price roughly doubles once you turn on backups, managed Postgres, and object storage.

Worked example 2: WordPress blog on Hetzner

A single WordPress site with light editorial content, 30k monthly visits, no ecommerce.

  • Base: Hetzner CX22 ($4.60/mo).
  • Bandwidth: 20 TB included; actual usage ~200 GB. Overage: $0.
  • Backups: Hetzner backup add-on ($0.92/mo — 20% of $4.60).
  • Snapshots: one monthly snapshot of 40 GB → $0.44/mo.
  • Managed Postgres: N/A (WordPress uses MySQL, self-hosted on the same VPS).
  • Load balancer: none.
  • Object storage: none.

Total: $5.96/mo. Very close to sticker because a small self-managed WordPress workload doesn't need any of the expensive line items.

Worked example 3: WooCommerce store on Cloudways

A WooCommerce store, 100k monthly visits, real orders. Cloudways DO 2 GB with the Cloudflare Enterprise add-on and Object Cache Pro.

  • Base: Cloudways DO 2 GB managed ($28/mo).
  • Bandwidth: 2 TB included; actual usage ~800 GB. Overage: $0.
  • Backups: included in base.
  • Snapshots: included in base.
  • Cloudflare Enterprise add-on: $5/mo.
  • Object Cache Pro (Redis): $10/mo.
  • Managed database: N/A (WooCommerce uses MySQL, on the same server).

Total: $43/mo. The Cloudways sticker is $28 and the "managed" story includes backups and snapshots, which is why the actual real total is closer to the sticker than DO's is.

The two hidden costs the formula doesn't cover

Your time. If you run an unmanaged VPS and spend 4 hours a month on server work (updates, monitoring, incident response), that's $200/mo at a $50/hour internal rate. This is the whole reason managed hosting exists.

Downtime cost. An unmanaged host with no monitoring and no backup restore drill can cost more in downtime during one bad weekend than years of managed-hosting premium. This is easy to underestimate until it happens once.

Cost-cutting moves that work

  • Move to Hetzner or Contabo for cost-only wins. Hetzner CX32 is $7.60 vs DigitalOcean Basic 8 GB at $48 for identical specs. See DigitalOcean to Hetzner migration.
  • Self-host Postgres on the same VPS if you don't need managed-DB features. This can shave $15-60/mo.
  • Skip managed backups; use a script + object storage. pg_dump to S3-compatible storage costs pennies per month. Real, in-house backup discipline.
  • Cache aggressively. Adding a CDN or a full-page cache in front of a low-traffic site often means you don't need to upgrade to the next VPS tier.

Cost-cutting moves that don't

  • Buying the smallest VPS "to save money". A 1 GB VPS at $5 is more expensive per unit of resource than a 4 GB VPS at $4.60 on Hetzner. See our cheapest VPS under $10 analysis.
  • Skipping backups. The one time you need them, the cost of not having them is many years of backup fees.
  • Turning off monitoring. Same shape.

Related guides

Prices as of 2026-09-22. Every price above links to the provider's own pricing page via the full comparison.