Every "best VPS" list agrees on the same three names, then disagrees about the order. That is because the ranking depends on one question: what are you paying for? Cores, memory, bandwidth, predictable performance, or the freedom to leave?
Here is the honest version for EU providers, split by what each one is actually best at.
The short answer
- Best overall for most people: Hetzner. Cheapest per core in the EU, 20 TB of traffic, hourly billing with a monthly cap.
- Best bandwidth and included extras: OVHcloud. Unlimited EU traffic and daily backups on every VPS tier.
- Best for predictable production performance: UpCloud. Flat pricing, zero egress fees, 99.99% SLA.
- Best raw RAM per euro: Contabo. 12 GB of RAM from about €7/month, if you accept older hardware.
- Best for ARM: Hetzner CAX line, on Ampere Altra cores.
- Best for cheap experiments: Scaleway STARDUST at under €1/month, or IONOS on a promotional term.
Hetzner: the default choice
Hetzner's current EU list, after the June 2026 price adjustment, starts at €5.49/month for the CX23 (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe) and €5.99 for the ARM-based CAX11 (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe). The CX33, with 4 vCPU and 8 GB, sits at €8.49.
Three things make it the default recommendation. Billing is hourly and capped at the monthly price, so a server that runs for three days costs three days. Every EU plan includes 20 TB of outbound traffic, which is more than most sites will ever move. And the API, CLI, Terraform provider, snapshots, private networks, and load balancers are all present, so you are not trading away tooling for price.
What you give up: no managed services worth mentioning, no phone support, and a hard split between cheap shared plans and much more expensive dedicated-core plans. The CPX and CCX lines cost several times the CX line for the same nominal core count.
OVHcloud: bandwidth and included backup
OVH's VPS 2027 range lists $4.54/month for VPS-1 (2 vCores, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe, 500 Mbps), $8.50 for VPS-2 (4 vCores, 8 GB, 75 GB), $12.32 for VPS-3 (6 vCores, 12 GB, 100 GB), and $23.37 for VPS-4 (8 vCores, 24 GB, 200 GB).
The differentiator is not the sticker price, it is what comes bundled: unlimited traffic in EU data centres, bandwidth that scales to 3 Gbps on the top tier, automatic daily backups of the previous 24 hours, and anti-DDoS included. A comparable backup setup on Hetzner is an add-on you configure yourself.
OVH is headquartered in France, runs its own data centres across Europe, and sells everything from a €4 VPS to bare metal. Prices are listed in USD on the global site, so EU customers need to account for VAT and currency on top.
UpCloud: the predictable option
UpCloud's new Starter plans begin at €3/month for 1 GB of RAM, 1 core, and 10 GB of storage, rising to €28/month for 16 GB and 4 cores. Every plan includes IPv4, a 99.99% SLA, and zero-cost data transfer in and out.
That SLA and the flat pricing are the pitch. There are no traffic overage surprises and no per-request billing, which matters when you are budgeting rather than optimising for the absolute lowest number. The trade-off is a smaller catalogue than OVH or Hetzner: fewer regions, fewer instance shapes, fewer managed add-ons.
Contabo: memory per euro
Contabo sells on RAM. Its Core VPS line advertises entry from €4.40/month on a 24-month term, and a plan with 6 vCPU and 12 GB of RAM around €7/month on promotion. Every plan includes unlimited traffic under a fair-use policy, DDoS protection, a firewall, and a dedicated IPv4.
The honest caveats: Core VPS runs on older hardware generations, port speeds start at 200–300 Mbit/s, and the promotional pricing depends on a long commitment. Contabo's Performance VPS line is the one with current AMD EPYC CPUs and NVMe, and it costs considerably more.
Scaleway and IONOS: the cheap end
Scaleway lists STARDUST1-S at about €0.43/month for 1 vCPU, 1 GB, and 100 Mbps, with no egress fees. DEV1-S (2 vCPU, 2 GB) is around €6.55/month. These are useful for a personal service, a small API, or a box you rebuild rather than maintain.
IONOS advertises VPS from £2/month, promotional for the first three months, with unlimited traffic and 99.99% availability. Its VPS+ plans bundle NVMe, snapshots, block storage, and a private network, and it is the most "hosting company" of the group: control panel first, API second.
What actually separates them
Price per core is not the same as price per unit of work. A 2-core shared plan on older hardware and a 2-core shared plan on a current EPYC are not comparable, which is why the CPU generation matters more than the core count on the invoice.
The second separator is what is included. Twenty terabytes of traffic, a daily backup, a 99.99% SLA, and free egress are worth real money if you would otherwise buy them separately.
The third is exit cost. All of these providers let you take an image and leave, but some make it easier than others. Hourly billing with no minimum term is the cheapest form of insurance.
A reasonable shortlist
If you want one recommendation: Hetzner for a self-managed Linux box, OVH if bandwidth or included backups decide it, UpCloud if you need an SLA and predictable billing, Contabo if RAM is the bottleneck and the workload is forgiving.
VPS in the European Union: Hetzner, Netcup, OVH compared. And for the wider hosting market, guide to European cloud and hosting providers.
Prices are list prices as published in October 2026, excluding VAT unless stated, and they change. Check the provider page before you order.
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