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A comparison between 5 cheap VPS providers with plans below $5 per month and how to earn $25 for free.

Here is a basic comparison between 5 reliable and cheap VPS providers with plans below $5 per month.

VPS Companies


OVH Linode DigitalOcean Scaleway Vultr
Foundation 1999 2003 2011 2013 2014
Headquarters Roubaix (FR) Galloway, NJ (US) New York (US) Paris (FR) Matawan, NJ (US)
Market 3° largest 2° largest
Website OVH Linode DigitalOcean Scaleway Vultr

Billing


OVH Linode DigitalOcean Scaleway Vultr
Credit Card Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
PayPal Yes Yes Yes No Yes
Bitcoin No No No No Yes
Affiliate/Referral Yes Yes Yes No Yes
Coupon Codes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Note:

  • Linode needs a credit card associated with the account first to be able to pay with PayPal later.

General Features


OVH Linode DigitalOcean Scaleway Vultr
European data centers 3 2 3 2 4
Documentation Docs Docs Docs Docs Docs
Doc. subjective valuation 6/10 9/10 9/10 6/10 8/10
Uptime guaranteed (SLA) 99,95% 99,9% 99,99% 99,9% 100%
Outage refund/credit (SLA) Yes Yes Yes No Yes
API Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
API Docs API Docs API Docs API Docs API Docs API Docs
Services status page Status Status Status Status Status
Support Quality
Account Limits 10 instances Limited instances (e.g. 50 VC1S ) 10 instances
Legal/ToS ToS ToS ToS ToS ToS

Note:

  • Scaleway has four grades of SLA, the first basic is for free but if you want something better, you have to pay a monthly fee.
  • One of the reasons why the Linode's documentation is so good and detailed is that they pay you 250$ for write a guide for them if it's good enough to publish. They are a small team (about 70 people), so it makes sense.
  • The Linode API is not a RESTful API yet, but they are working in an upcoming one.
  • The default limits usually can be increased by asking support, but not in Scaleway, where you would have to pay fo a higher level of support. Those limits are set by default by the providers to stop abusing the accounts.
  • Scaleway also imposes a lot more of limits that can be looked up in the account settings (e.g. 100 images or 25 snapshots).
  • Vultr also impose a limit of a maximum instance cost of 150$ per month and requires a deposit when charges exceed 50$.

Plans (≤5$)

OVH Linode DigitalOcean Scaleway Vultr Vultr
Name VPS SSD 1 Linode 1024 5bucks VC1S 20GB SSD 25GB SSD
Monthly Price 3,62€ 5$ 5$ 2,99€ 2,5$ 5$
CPU / Threads 1/1 1/1 1/1 1/2 1/1 1/1
CPU model Xeon E5v3 2.4GHz Xeon E5-2680 v3 2.5GHz Xeon E5-2650L v3 1.80 GHz Atom C2750 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon 2.4 GHz
RAM 2 GB 1 GB 1 GB 2 GB 1 GB 1 GB
SSD Storage 10 GB 20 GB 20 GB 50 GB 20 GB 25 GB
Traffic 1 TB 1 TB 500 GB 1 TB
Bandwidth (In / Out) 100/100 Mbps 40/1 Gbps 1/10 Gbps 200/200 Mbps 1/10 Gbps 1/10 Gbps
Virtualization KVM KVM (Qemu) KVM KVM (Qemu) KVM (Qemu) KVM (Qemu)
Anti-DDoS Protection Yes No No No 10$ 10$
Backups No 2$ 1$ No 0,5 $ 1$
Snapshots 2,99$ Free (up to 3) 0,05$ per GB 0,02 € per GB Free (Beta) Free (Beta)
IPv6 Yes Yes Optional Optional Optional Optional
Additional public IP 2$ (up to 16) Yes Floating IPs (0,006$ hour if inactive) 0,9€ (up to 10) 2$ (up to 2) / 3$ floating IPs 2$ (up to 2) / 3$ floating IPs
Private Network No Optional Optional No (dynamic IPs) Optional Optional
Firewall Yes (by IP) No Yes (by group) Yes (by group) Yes (by group) Yes (by group)
Block Storage From 5€ - 50GB No From 10$ - 100GB From 1€ - 50GB From 1$ - 10GB From 1$ - 10GB
Monitoring Yes (SLA) Yes (metrics, SLA) Beta (metrics, performance, SLA) No No No
Load Balancer 13$ 20$ 20$ No High availability (floating IPs & BGP) High availability (floating IPs & BGP)
DNS Zone Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes
Reverse DNS Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Note:

  • OVH hides its real CPU, but what they claim in their web matches with the hardware information reported in the tests (an E5-2620 v3 or E5-2630 v3).

  • Vultr also hides the real CPU, but it could be a Xeon E5-2620/2630 v3 for the 20GB SSD plan and probably a v4 for the 25GB SSD one.

  • Vultr $2.50/month plan is only currently available in Miami, FL and New York, NJ. And it is currently claimed to be sold out.

  • OVH throttle network speed to 1 Mbps after excess monthly 10 TB traffic

  • The prices for DigitalOcean and Vultr do not include taxes (VAT) for European countries.

  • Linode allows you to have free additional public IPs but you have to request them to support and justify that you need them.

  • Linode Longview's monitoring system is free up to 10 clients, but also has a professional version that starts at 20$/mo for three client.

  • Linode don't support currently block storage, but they are working on it to offer the service in the upcoming months.

  • Linode snapshots (called Images) are limited to 2GB per Image, with a total of 10GB total Image storage and 3 Images per account. Disks of recently rebuilt instances are automatically stored as Images.

  • Scaleway also offers for the same price a BareMetal plan (with 4 ARM Cores), but as it is a dedicated server, I do not include it here.

  • Scaleway does not offers Anti-DDoS protection but they maintain that they use the Online.net's standard one.

  • Scaleway uses dynamic IPs by default as private IPs and you only can opt to use static IPs if you remove the Public IP from the instance.

  • Scaleway uses dynamic IPv6, meaning that IPv6 will change if you stop your server. You can't even opt to reserve IPv6.

  • The OVH panel is terrible to use. I would not suggest to take OVH as an option.

Digital Ocean Promo Code

Save $25 for your Cloud Computing Solution with Digital Ocean.

How to get the Discount?

1.) Use this link to Sign Up and save your first $10.

2.) Enter the Promocode LOWENDBOX when you choose your payment method and get another $15 discount.

Other Promocodes:

  • DROPLET10
  • ALLSSD10
  • DODEPLOY
  • SHIPITFAST10
  • OMGSSD10
  • FRANKFURT
  • heresthething

Vultr Promo Code

Get free $13 for Vultr SSD Cloud Servers.

How to get the Vultr Discount?

Step 1: Use this link to Sign Up and get $10 for free.

Step 2: Go here and get $3 more for "Verifying your Twitter account", "Following @Vultr", "Tweeting about Vultr".

Step 3 (Optional): Regular Promotion by Vultr, sometimes you can get an additional $100 after you charge $100.

Step 4 (Optional): Visit free trial page, register a new account. There’s no need to add any gift code, Vultr automatically adds $50 to your account.

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