The cheapest small cloud server depends on whether you optimise for sticker price or specs per dollar — and the answer is different for each.
Prices below are list prices as of June 2026 and are estimates — verify on each provider’s pricing page. Hetzner figures are converted from EUR (~1.09 USD/EUR) and approximate.
Cheapest small VMs ranked
| Provider | Plan | vCPU | RAM | $/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Cloud | e2-micro (always-free) | 2 | 1 GB | $0 |
| AWS | Lightsail 512 MB | 2 | 0.5 GB | $3.50 |
| Azure | B1ls | 1 | 0.5 GB | ~$3.80 |
| Hetzner | CX22 | 2 | 4 GB | ~$4.15 (EUR3.79) |
| DigitalOcean | Basic Droplet | 1 | 0.5 GB | $4 |
| Vultr | Cloud Compute | 1 | 1 GB | $5 |
| Linode | Nanode | 1 | 1 GB | $5 |
See the full VPS comparison.
Sticker price vs value
The lowest price often has the least RAM. Hetzner’s ~EUR3.79 CX22 has eight times the RAM of a $4 DigitalOcean Droplet or AWS Lightsail’s $3.50 plan. If you need real headroom for an app, database or container host, Hetzner is the value leader by a distance.
The trade-offs
- Hetzner — cheapest specs, but mostly EU regions (plus limited US/APAC), euro billing, smaller managed-service catalog. See DigitalOcean vs Hetzner.
- DigitalOcean / Vultr / Linode — flat, predictable pricing, good global coverage, polished consoles, managed databases.
- AWS / Azure / Google Cloud — higher prices but unmatched breadth of services and regions; Google’s free e2-micro is genuinely useful for tiny always-on workloads.
Don’t forget bandwidth
Most VPS plans include a transfer pool: Hetzner cloud servers include 20 TB/month, while DigitalOcean, Vultr and Linode include 1 TB on the small tiers. Overage is cheap ($0.005–$0.01/GB) but check the egress comparison if you serve a lot of data.
Need a database too?
See the managed Postgres comparison — Hetzner has no managed DB (self-host), while DigitalOcean, Vultr and Linode start around $15/mo. All figures are estimates — confirm on the vendor pages.