Choosing & sizing
What is the cheapest VPS that is actually usable?
About $4 a month buys 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM and 20 GB of NVMe on real KVM virtualisation. That is genuinely enough for a WireGuard VPN, a DNS resolver, a Tor relay, a small bot or a static site. Below that price you are almost certainly buying an oversold container rather than a virtual machine.
The trap at the bottom of the market is virtualisation type. OpenVZ and LXC instances share the host kernel, which means memory is routinely oversold, Docker does not work reliably, and you cannot load kernel modules — so no WireGuard on older hosts, no custom firewall modules, no nested virtualisation.
A 1 GB KVM instance running Debian or Alpine has roughly 850 MB genuinely available after the operating system. That is a comfortable amount for a single-purpose service and a tight amount for anything with a database.
See also: Nested virtualisation · WireGuard · OpenVZ · vCPU
7 answers in Choosing & sizing
- What is a VPS? A VPS (virtual private server) is a virtual machine with guaranteed CPU, memory and storage, running its own operating system on shared physical hardw…
- What is a VPS used for? A VPS runs anything that needs to be online continuously: websites and APIs, game servers, VPN and proxy endpoints, mail servers, trading bots, CI run…
- How much does a VPS cost? A usable VPS starts at about $4 a month for 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM and 20 GB of NVMe storage. A production instance with dedicated cores, 8 GB of RAM and…
- How much RAM does a VPS need? Match RAM to the workload, not to a price tier. 1 GB runs a VPN, DNS resolver or small bot. 2–4 GB runs a small website with a database. 8 GB is the c…
- How many vCPUs does a VPS need? Most workloads need fewer cores than people buy. One shared core saturates a gigabit VPN link. Two dedicated cores run a busy website. Four run a game…
- How much bandwidth does a VPS need? Most projects use far less than they fear. A typical blog serving 50,000 monthly visits uses about 100 GB. A VPN carrying 1080p video for one person u…