The real price of a €4 VPS
We see it every week in support: a customer migrates to us after months on a €4 VPS, and their first remark isn't "it's faster" but "I finally stopped debugging". This article adds up what the sticker price doesn't tell you.
Wild overselling
A physical server with 64 cores and 512 GB of RAM costs, all included (amortized hardware, network, power, datacenter), between €0.60 and €0.90 per vCore per month. To sell a 4 vCore / 8 GB VPS for €4, you must pack 40 to 80 VPS onto the same machine, betting that everyone won't consume at once.
That bet is measured with one simple metric: steal time — CPU time the hypervisor owes you but doesn't deliver.
top -bn1 | grep "Cpu(s)"
# Look at the "st" value: above 1% permanently,
# the provider is overselling its machines.On our hypervisors, median steal is 0.1%. On a €4 VPS we benchmarked for this article: 14% at peak hour.
Stealth throttling
More insidious: some plans cap CPU after a few minutes of sustained load. The 30-second benchmark passes, the 20-minute compile crawls. Test with a 15-minute load:
stress-ng --cpu 4 --timeout 900 --metrics-briefCompare operations per second at the start and end of the run: a gap above 20% reveals throttling.
The shared disk, the invisible ailment
Entry-level NVMe shared between 60 VPS saturates in IOPS long before reaching its peak throughput. Typical result: a MySQL database going from 40 ms to 900 ms response time at 8 PM, every single evening. This is the most common scenario among the migrations we assist.
The cost nobody counts: your hours
Based on tickets handled with migrating customers, let's add it up:
- 2 to 4 h/month diagnosing "unexplainable" slowness
- 1 to 2 interventions per quarter after a provider-side incident (saturated node, forced migration, storage failure)
- Lost sales: a TTFB going from 250 ms to 1.2 s costs, according to e-commerce studies, 5 to 10% of conversions
At €40/hour, the €4 VPS actually costs €80 to €160 per month. Our €19 VPS costs €19.
How to verify before buying
Before any commitment, demand a trial period and run a public benchmark like yabs: steal time, 4k random IOPS, network throughput to several regions. Numbers never lie, unlike product pages.
Our position
We will never sell a €4 VPS, because physics doesn't allow it without cheating. Our prices cover reserved, not shared, resources: it's the only difference that matters, and it's measured in steal time.