Cloud server pricing in 2026: the same server at 8 clouds

The $4-a-month cloud server you see quoted for DigitalOcean has a shared CPU. Its dedicated server with 2 vCPUs and 8 GB is $63. Compare dedicated to dedicated at US list prices on October 21, 2026, and a 4 vCPU, 16 GB cloud server costs $103 to $153 a month. AWS, Azure and Google sit inside that range.

So the server isn't what makes a hyperscaler bill big. The disk, the IP address and the traffic are, and the server's price leaves all three out. Ours is $130 for 4 vCPUs, 16 GB of RAM and a 160 GB disk, and outbound traffic isn't metered.

2026 cloud pricing comparison: one dedicated server, three sizes

Each size has 4 GB of RAM per vCPU: 8, 16 and 32 GB. The plans are our Standard VM, Hetzner CCX13, CCX23 and CCX33, Vultr Optimized Cloud Compute (General Purpose), DigitalOcean General Purpose droplets, Azure D2s, D4s and D8s v5, Google n2-standard, AWS m7i and Akamai G8 Dedicated.

These are monthly list prices in US regions on October 21, 2026, for Linux, on demand, with no commitment. The developer clouds are on their dedicated-CPU plans and the hyperscalers on their general-purpose types that don't burst. Where a cloud lists only an hourly price, we multiplied it by 730 hours.

So a small dedicated server, 2 vCPUs and 8 GB, runs $50.99 to $80.30 a month across these eight clouds, and a large one with 8 vCPUs and 32 GB runs $165.99 to $306.60. Ours is $65 and $255. The disk in the price differs too: ours and Hetzner's come with 80, 160 and 240 GB, Vultr's with 50 to 160 GB, DigitalOcean's with 25 to 100 GiB and Akamai's with 82 to 328 GB. AWS, Azure and Google include no disk at all.

Now give every 4 vCPU server a 160 GB disk and a public IPv4 address, and the order changes.

Add the disk and the IP, and we come in at $131, under DigitalOcean's $136 ($126 plus a $10 volume), while AWS and Azure land about $32 a month above us. Hetzner comes to $103.59 with its $0.60 IP and Vultr to $128 with an $8 volume. Google lands at $133.08 because it takes up to 20% off an N2 server that runs the whole month, no commitment needed: $113.43 for the server plus $19.65 for the disk and IP. None of this has any traffic in it yet. That comes further down.

Hetzner Cloud pricing in the US since June 2026

Hetzner's US servers are the lowest-priced of the eight plans in our table, at every size. The 4 vCPU CCX23 is $102.99 a month in Ashburn or Hillsboro, $27 less than ours.

They also more than doubled this year. On June 15, 2026, Hetzner raised its US prices for new orders: the CCX13 went from $19.99 to $50.99, the CCX23 from $39.99 to $102.99 and the CCX33 from $76.99 to $165.99. A price list that still shows $39.99 is pricing a server you can't order anymore.

A few more US details: the price leaves out the IPv4 address, which is $0.60 a month. US servers include 1 TB of traffic on the CCX13, 2 TB on the CCX23 and 3 TB on the CCX33, then $1.20 per extra TB. Support is by email. We compared the two of us line by line on our Hetzner alternative page.

DigitalOcean Droplets, Vultr and Akamai pricing: shared vs dedicated CPU

DigitalOcean's $4 droplet is a Basic plan: 512 MiB of memory and one shared vCPU. Cheap-cloud lists often rank it right next to dedicated servers. When our team first priced DigitalOcean against our own VMs, I pushed back: a shared CPU and a dedicated CPU aren't the same thing, so the fair match is DigitalOcean's dedicated CPU pricing.

So here's the dedicated side of each:

• DigitalOcean General Purpose droplets are $63, $126 and $252 for 2, 4 and 8 vCPUs. They include 4,000 to 6,000 GiB of outbound transfer, pooled across your team, then $0.01 per GiB, and a public IPv4. The disks are small: 50 GiB at 4 vCPU, so getting to 160 GB takes a $10 volume.
• Vultr Optimized Cloud Compute, General Purpose, is $60, $120 and $240 with 5,120 to 7,168 GB of transfer, then $0.01 per GB. Vultr's VX1 plans on its pricing page have dedicated CPUs for less ($87.60 at 4 vCPU), but they boot from block storage with no local disk, so add the volume before you compare them.
• Akamai Cloud (formerly Linode) sells the exact 2/8, 4/16 and 8/32 shapes as G8 Dedicated, priced by the hour with no transfer bundled, so outbound traffic is $0.005 per GB. Among US regions, G8 is only in Washington 2, Chicago and Seattle. Its G6 Dedicated plans run in every US region with transfer included, but with half the memory: $72 buys 4 CPUs and 8 GB.

Our Standard VMs are one plan at every size in the table: $10 per vCPU and $5 per GB of RAM a month, plus $1 for every 16 GB of disk. Premium VMs run on AMD EPYC and cost 1.2 times that, $156 a month at 4 vCPU. Billing by the hour instead of on a monthly term adds 2%.

AWS, Azure and Google Cloud prices compared to the developer clouds

At list price, the hyperscaler server is 8% to 13% above ours at 4 vCPU: Azure's D4s v5 is $140.16, Google's n2-standard-4 is $141.79 and AWS's m7i.xlarge is $147.17. Then come the meters:

• Disk: AWS gp3 is $0.08 per GB a month, Google's balanced disk is about $0.10 per GB, and Azure sells disks in fixed sizes, so 160 GB means paying for a 256 GiB Standard SSD at $19.20.
• IP address: each charges $0.005 an hour for a public IPv4, $3.65 a month.
• Traffic: AWS and Azure give 100 GB a month free, then $0.09 and $0.087 per GB. Google's Premium Tier gives 1 GiB, then $0.12 per GiB.

Here's the same 4 vCPU server, disk and IP included, with no traffic and with 1 TB going out a month:

Send a terabyte out and the three hyperscalers bill $78 to $112 a month for it. On ours it's still $131. We worked out 5 TB and 20 TB at ten clouds in another post.

A one- or three-year commitment cuts the server price. AWS takes up to 66% off with a Compute Savings Plan, or 72% on an EC2 Instance Savings Plan, and Google up to 55% with a committed use discount, for a one- or three-year term. The disk, the IP and every gigabyte out are still billed by the meter.

Best value cloud hosting: how we'd choose

We're not the cheapest on this page, and I'm fine with that. We don't want a race to the lowest price. Performance, price, service and features all go into how we set ours.

Where we think we're the best value: a server that sends real traffic out, run by a team that wants a person to answer when something breaks. Every other cloud on this page meters outbound traffic once you pass its allowance. Ours has no meter at all.

The other half is support. On every American Cloud account, chat and tickets get a reply in under 2 minutes at the median, and there's no plan to buy for it. Elsewhere, a response target is a paid plan: DigitalOcean's Standard support targets under 2 hours for $99 a month, Azure's Standard plan targets one hour on critical issues for $100 a month, Google's Enhanced support does the same from $100, and AWS Business Support+ is $29 a month or 9% of your monthly charges, whichever is greater.

To price the exact size you run, from 1 to 32 vCPUs, use our pricing calculator.