Cheap VPS plans are everywhere. Cheap and actually-good plans are rarer. Here's the small list of things worth checking before you hand over a year of payment to save €3 a month.
1. Virtualisation type
You want KVM for almost any modern workload. OpenVZ and LXC have their place, but they share kernels, can be oversold harder, and limit what you can run (custom kernels, Docker-in-VM, full-disk encryption). If a plan doesn't say what virt it uses, assume it's the cheaper one.
2. Where the box physically sits
The marketing page may say “offshore”. The actual datacentre matters more. Look for:
- The country and city of the facility (not just the country of the company).
- Whose IP space the host announces —
whoisthe IP they list as a test target. - Tier of facility (Tier III is fine for most projects; you don't need Tier IV).
3. Bandwidth math
“Unmetered 1 Gbps” on a $4 plan is rarely true unmetered — there's almost always a fair-use ceiling. Ask for the soft cap. A plan that admits to a 10 TB/month soft cap is more honest than one that promises infinity and shapes you to a crawl when you hit 2 TB.
4. Oversell ratio (the one nobody publishes)
Hosts always oversell to some degree. The sane question isn't “do you oversell” (yes, everyone does) but “by how much”. Two proxies you can use without insider knowledge:
- Look at trial reviews on independent forums (LowEndTalk, Reddit) for steady-state CPU steal.
- Buy the smallest plan first, run a month, then commit annually.
5. Support response time, on the channel you'll use
If you live in tickets, ticket-test them. Ask a pre-sales question and see how long the reply takes. The provider that answers in 4 minutes at sales will often answer in 4 minutes when your VM is offline at 2 AM.
Red flags on cheap tiers
- No published acceptable-use policy.
- “Lifetime” pricing — the lifetime is the host's, not yours.
- Crypto-only payment but no contact email or company details anywhere.
- Stock photos of datacentres that reverse-image-search to other companies.
Where to spend the savings
If you're going to economise, economise on RAM (you can usually upgrade later). Don't economise on the network — a VPS with 1 GB RAM and a clean 1 Gbps uplink will out-perform 4 GB on a congested 100 Mbps shared pipe for almost any web workload.
