How we compare hosting prices

Every price is the provider’s own list price

Each plan shown here is the provider’s own public list price in USD, read from its own price API or pricing page. We do not use resellers, coupons or negotiated discounts. Where a provider publishes a USD price we use it as published (UpCloud’s global price, Hetzner’s USD price, Contabo’s USD price excluding VAT). A provider that prices only in euros (netcup) is listed at its euro price without VAT, converted to US dollars at the European Central Bank’s reference rate of 2026-10-13 (1 EUR = 1.1188 USD), read daily; the euro price is shown with every converted figure. Where a provider sells month to month but discounts longer terms (Contabo, OVHcloud, netcup), we show the month-to-month price. Where the headline price needs a prepaid term (Hostinger 24 months, IONOS and CloudCone 12 months), every table, sentence and search snippet that quotes it names the term.

Prices from Akamai Cloud (Linode), Vultr, OVHcloud, AWS Lightsail, Kinsta, RackNerd, CloudCone, Hostwinds, GreenCloudVPS, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, BuyVM, Liquid Web, RamNode, LunaNode, Webdock, Hivelocity, Atlantic.Net, Cherry Servers, VPSDime, DreamHost, IONOS, Hostinger, Hosting.com, Kamatera, HostHatch, Scaleway, UpCloud, Evoxt, Hostodo, Advin Servers, Alwyzon, LiteServer, ServaRica, Civo, Exoscale, Aruba Cloud, CloudServer, DediRock, CrownCloud, HostUS and Virtono are read automatically every day. Contabo, InterServer and netcup refuse or rate-limit automated readers, so their own price data is read by hand from a normal network. Cloudways is captured by hand. Every price carries the date it was read and how (API, page or manual); the index was last refreshed 2026-10-14. A price that moves more than 30% in a day is held for a human check instead of being published; an automatically read price that cannot be re-read for seven days is hidden; and a plan the provider shows as not orderable keeps its price on the provider page but leaves every ranking until it can be ordered again.

Each plan also records whether the price excludes VAT and whether a public IPv4 address costs extra. Where it does, the address is added to the monthly cost in every ranking, every entry and “from” price and every cost per vCPU or per gigabyte, and the list price is shown next to it with the IPv4 charge named. An entry or “from” price is always a plan you can order today with a public IPv4 address.

The metrics are simple on purpose

For each plan we compute cost per vCPU, cost per gigabyte of RAM and cost per gigabyte of storage from the published list price, with a separately billed IPv4 address added. These numbers are useful for the sizing decision — “am I paying too much for the memory I actually need” — and useless for the operational decision — “will this box handle my workload”. We are honest about the second one: raw dollars per gigabyte of RAM cannot tell you whether the vCPU is a shared thread or a dedicated core, or whether the storage tier delivers 3k or 100k IOPS. That is what the paragraph under each plan is for.

Managed WordPress plans (Kinsta, some Cloudways tiers) are priced on visits rather than cores. We show cost per thousand included visits for those, and skip the per-core comparison, so the leaderboard on the compare page does not treat a Kinsta Single 35k as if it competed with a $6 Droplet for raw compute.

What we deliberately do NOT measure

• Real-world benchmarks. We do not run our own CPU, disk or network probes. When we say Hetzner has more included transfer than Vultr, we mean their published allowances differ. If someone claims category-winning benchmarks without publishing the harness, treat that as marketing, not measurement.
• One price per plan in the rankings. Provider pages and the main rankings use each provider’s standard list price (for Hetzner, its Germany and Finland price). Some providers charge more in other places, so the country and city pages use the price charged there, from the providers’ own location data.
• Uptime numbers. Every provider claims 99.99% SLA credit terms. Historical outage data is genuinely useful, but we do not have a consistent source across the providers here, so we do not fabricate a scoreboard.
• Support quality. We say what tier of support each provider bundles (chat, ticket, phone) and note where community reputation sharply diverges from the official promise. We do not run mystery-shopping to score them.

Affiliate disclosure

Some providers pay us if you sign up through our link: CloudCone, Contabo, DigitalOcean (in account credit, not cash), Hostwinds, InterServer, RackNerd, VPSDime and Vultr. Every other provider pays us nothing and is listed anyway. Every provider page states, in plain language, whether that relationship exists. This list is generated from the programmes that are live, so it changes the day one is approved or ends.

When a provider does not pay us, our outbound link goes to the provider’s clean URL with no tracking parameter attached. We would rather show an unmonetised comparison honestly than exclude a provider just because leaving them in reduces our take rate. Doing otherwise would misrepresent the market — leaving Hetzner off the budget-cloud page would let a paid rival look cheaper than it is.

The full company disclosure and affiliate summary sits under Terms and each provider page carries its own.

How to correct us

If a price is stale or a specification is wrong, email [email protected] with the provider name, the plan and a link to the source page. We change the dataset in one place and every comparison, matchup and per-provider page updates on the next deploy.

StackRates is operated by First State Growth LLC.