How much does a VPS cost?

Price is driven mainly by three things: whether the cores are shared or dedicated, how much RAM you need, and how much storage. Bandwidth is usually included in the plan rather than billed separately, which is the largest single cost difference between a VPS and a hyperscaler cloud instance.

Beware of prices that look impossible. A "$1 VPS" is almost always OpenVZ with oversold memory, no real kernel and no ability to run Docker. The floor for genuine KVM with reserved memory sits around $3–4.