Best Cheap VPS Under $5/Month in 2026: Budget-Friendly Picks

Best Cheap VPS Under $5/Month in 2026: Budget-Friendly Picks

“Cheap VPS” can mean great value or painful compromises. Under $5/month, the difference is rarely the headline specs — it’s the hidden constraints:

• CPU policy (overselling / throttling / noisy neighbors)
• Bandwidth caps and egress rules
• Renewal pricing and billing tricks
• Refund terms (or lack of them)

This guide is about making a low-risk shortlist, then validating before you commit.

Use the live shortlist (instead of a static list)

Prices and plan specs change. Instead of a frozen “top 5”, start from live pages that update with your dataset:

• Best VPS under $5 (ranked shortlist)
• Cheap VPS (fast budget scan)
• VPS Finder (full filtering)

Filtered VPS Finder URLs are intentionally noindex to avoid thin/duplicate pages. The rankings and tag pages are the indexable hubs.

What you can realistically run under $5

Under-$5 VPS plans are usually best for:

• Small websites and landing pages
• Monitoring agents and small APIs
• Personal VPN (light usage)
• Dev/staging and experiments

They are usually not ideal for:

• High-traffic e-commerce
• Heavy databases
• CPU-heavy workloads (build pipelines, video encoding)

What to verify before you buy (the real checklist)

1) Monthly price vs renewal price

Some “deals” are only for the first billing cycle. Always check:

• Renewal price
• Minimum billing period
• Setup fees (if any)

Browse promos here: Deals and VPS coupons.

2) CPU policy and performance consistency

Cheap plans can be perfectly fine, but CPU steal and throttling are common complaints.

Practical approach:

• Prefer plans with benchmarks or measured signals when possible
• Validate after purchase with a quick CPU test and real workload checks

Compare value signals here: Performance.

3) Bandwidth and egress rules

Under-$5 plans can have strict transfer caps. Confirm:

• Monthly traffic allowance (GB/TB)
• Port speed
• Overages or throttling

If bandwidth matters, shortlist: Unmetered egress plans.

4) Location and latency

Cheap is not useful if the server is far from your users. Start with region, then compare plans in that region:

• Best VPS by region
• Latency tiers (how to interpret latency labels)

5) IPv6 and networking basics

If you need IPv6, don’t assume it’s included.

Shortlist: IPv6 VPS plans.

6) Refund eligibility (reduce risk)

If you’re experimenting with a new provider, refund eligibility can be worth more than saving $1/month:

• Refund-eligible plans.

Example starting points (from the dataset)

These are not “the best” for everyone — they’re examples of the kinds of plans that can fit under-$5 budgets. Always verify pricing and terms on the provider checkout page.

Example plan	Why it’s worth checking
Hetzner CX23 (DE)	Very strong price-to-spec ratio for a low-cost EU VPS.
IONOS VPS XS	Entry-level option that can work for light services.
BuyVM Las Vegas Ryzen KVM 512MB	Tiny plan for experiments and minimal services.
CloudCone SSD VPS 1	Low-cost option to validate for your workload.
RackNerd KVM VPS - 512 MB RAM	Ultra-budget plan category (validate performance expectations).
GreenCloudVPS BudgetKVMJPVF-3 (Tokyo)	Example of an under-$5 plan in Asia (validate routes/latency).

Recommended workflow (5 minutes to a shortlist)

1. Start with Best VPS under $5
2. If you have a region requirement, switch to Best VPS by region
3. Narrow by requirements:

• IPv6 → IPv6
• NVMe → NVMe
• Refund eligibility → Refund-eligible

4. Use VPS Finder to apply budget + region + tags together
5. After purchase, validate with basic benchmarks and your real workload

Next steps

• Want a faster path? Start at Use cases and pick your workload.
• Want to understand scoring? Read Methodology.