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Vultr’s pricing page lists plans starting at $2.50/month, which sounds like a bargain — but that $2.50 entry plan is IPv6-only and practically useless for most real deployments. The actual entry point for a usable VPS with IPv4 is $5–$6/month, and once you factor in automatic backups, snapshot storage, and Vultr’s notoriously counterintuitive billing behavior for stopped instances, the number on your invoice can be very different from the number on the pricing page. This guide covers every Vultr pricing tier in 2026 — Cloud Compute, High Frequency, VX1 (launched October 2025), Optimized Cloud, Bare Metal, and GPU — and gives you concrete recommendations by use case so you know exactly what you’ll pay.
Vultr Pricing 2026: All Plan Tiers at a Glance
Vultr’s lineup covers more ground than most independent cloud providers. As of June 2026, the platform offers six distinct compute product families:
- Cloud Compute (VC2 / Standard) — Shared vCPU, SATA SSD, entry-level pricing
- Cloud Compute — High Performance (AMD EPYC / NVMe) — Faster AMD Genoa processors, NVMe storage
- Cloud Compute — High Frequency (Intel Xeon) — Intel Xeon at 3GHz+, NVMe SSD, best for CPU-bound workloads
- VX1 — Dedicated AMD EPYC cores, launched October 2025, Vultr’s newest tier
- Optimized Cloud Compute — Dedicated resources, sub-tiers: General Purpose, CPU Optimized, Memory Optimized
- Bare Metal — Physical dedicated servers, no virtualization
- Cloud GPU — On-demand NVIDIA and AMD GPU instances
All plans use hourly billing capped at a monthly maximum (672-hour cap for most compute instances; 730-hour for GPU and VX1). This is actually a good thing for ephemeral workloads — you can spin up a server at noon, tear it down by midnight, and pay for 12 hours rather than a full month.
Prices last verified: June 2026 (Vultr’s official pricing page)
Cloud Compute Pricing: Standard, High Performance, and High Frequency
Standard Cloud Compute (Shared vCPU / SATA SSD)
This is Vultr’s true entry tier. Shared vCPUs, SATA SSD storage, and the lowest prices in the lineup.
| Plan | vCPU | RAM | Storage | Bandwidth | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IPv6 Only | 1 | 0.5 GB | 10 GB | 0.5 TB | $2.50 |
| Starter (IPv4) | 1 | 1 GB | 25 GB | 1 TB | $5.00 |
| Standard 2GB | 1 | 2 GB | 55 GB | 2 TB | $10.00 |
| Standard 4GB | 2 | 4 GB | 80 GB | 3 TB | $20.00 |
| Standard 8GB | 4 | 8 GB | 160 GB | 4 TB | $40.00 |
Prices last checked: June 2026
The $2.50 plan is limited to 2 instances per account and works only over IPv6 — no IPv4 address included. For anything with a domain attached or a web-facing app, you’re starting at $5/month. The Standard 2GB plan at $10/month is solid for a basic WordPress site, personal project, or staging server, but the SATA SSD is noticeably slower than the NVMe options above it.
High Performance Cloud Compute (AMD EPYC / NVMe)
Same price bracket as DigitalOcean, but you get NVMe storage and AMD EPYC-Genoa processors instead of older silicon and spinning-style SSDs. I’ve been running test workloads on the 2 vCPU / 4 GB plan ($24/month) and the disk I/O difference versus the standard tier is real — combined random IOPS hit approximately 118,000, compared to the sluggish SATA baseline.
| Plan | vCPU | RAM | NVMe Storage | Bandwidth | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HP 1GB | 1 | 1 GB | 25 GB | 1 TB | $6.00 |
| HP 2GB | 1 | 2 GB | 50 GB | 2 TB | $12.00 |
| HP 4GB | 2 | 4 GB | 100 GB | 3 TB | $24.00 |
| HP 8GB | 4 | 8 GB | 180 GB | 4 TB | $48.00 |
| HP 16GB | 6 | 16 GB | 384 GB | 5 TB | $96.00 |
| HP 24GB | 12 | 24 GB | 576 GB | 6 TB | $144.00 |
Prices last checked: June 2026
For most developers choosing between Standard and High Performance, the $1/month premium (HP 1GB at $6 vs Standard Starter at $5) is a no-brainer. You get NVMe storage and a meaningfully faster processor for one dollar more. The sweet spot for small production deployments is the HP 4GB at $24/month.
High Frequency Cloud Compute (Intel Xeon 3GHz+)
Intel Xeon at 3GHz+ with NVMe SSD. Available in fewer configurations than AMD EPYC, but worth it if your workload is CPU-bound and you specifically need Intel architecture (some legacy applications, certain database configurations).
| Plan | vCPU | RAM | NVMe Storage | Bandwidth | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HF 1GB | 1 | 1 GB | 32 GB | 1 TB | $6.00 |
| HF 4GB | 2 | 4 GB | 128 GB | 3 TB | $24.00 |
| HF 16GB | 4 | 16 GB | 384 GB | 6 TB | $96.00 |
Prices last checked: June 2026
At $6/month, the HF 1GB includes 32 GB NVMe — 7 GB more storage than the equivalent AMD plan at the same price. The High Frequency tier is a niche pick; for most workloads AMD EPYC Genoa’s single-core Geekbench 6 score of 1,926 is more than competitive. But if you’re running PHP-heavy stacks or Redis and the Intel clockspeed matters to you, the HF tier delivers.
VX1 and Optimized Cloud Compute: The Dedicated-Core Tiers
This is where Vultr pricing gets interesting. Both VX1 and Optimized Cloud Compute give you dedicated cores — no noisy neighbor contention — at prices that undercut traditional bare metal significantly.
VX1 Cloud Compute (Launched October 2025)
Vultr’s newest compute tier arrived in October 2025 and made a big claim: up to 82% better performance-per-dollar versus ARM-based hyperscaler alternatives for x86 workloads. Independent benchmark analysis from VPSBenchmarks broadly confirmed the performance story for CPU-bound tasks, though large-scale third-party validation is still accumulating as of mid-2026.
VX1 runs on AMD EPYC with dedicated cores, up to 50 Gbps networking, and provisions in under 15 seconds (faster than any other Vultr tier). It’s billed on a 730-hour monthly cap rather than the 672-hour cap used by regular compute instances.
| Config | vCPU | RAM | Storage | Bandwidth | ~Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GP Block 2C/8G | 2 | 8 GB | Block storage | 5 TB | $43.80 |
| GP NVMe 2C/8G | 2 | 8 GB | 120 GB NVMe | 5 TB | $55.48 |
| GP Block 4C/16G | 4 | 16 GB | Block storage | 10 TB | $87.60 |
| GP NVMe 4C/16G | 4 | 16 GB | 240 GB NVMe | 10 TB | $111.69 |
| GP Block 8C/32G | 8 | 32 GB | Block storage | 20 TB | $175.20 |
| GP Block 16C/64G | 16 | 64 GB | Block storage | 40 TB | $350.40 |
| GP Block 32C/128G | 32 | 128 GB | Block storage | 80 TB | $700.80 |
| Memory 2C/16G | 2 | 16 GB | Block storage | 5 TB | $58.40 |
| Memory 4C/32G | 4 | 32 GB | Block storage | 10 TB | $116.80 |
| Memory 8C/64G | 8 | 64 GB | Block storage | 20 TB | $233.60 |
Prices last checked: June 2026
Note that the “Block storage” configs don’t include local NVMe — you attach block storage separately at $0.10/GB/month for NVMe or $0.04/GB/month for HDD. For a typical 100 GB NVMe block volume, that adds $10/month on top of the base price.
Optimized Cloud Compute (Dedicated AMD EPYC / NVMe)
Older than VX1 but still relevant for production workloads needing guaranteed resources. Three sub-tiers cover most scenarios:
| Config | vCPU | RAM | NVMe Storage | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GP 1C/4G | 1 | 4 GB | 30 GB | $30.00 |
| GP 2C/8G | 2 | 8 GB | 50 GB | $60.00 |
| GP 4C/16G | 4 | 16 GB | 80 GB | $120.00 |
| CPU-Opt 2C/4G | 2 | 4 GB | 50 GB | $40.00 |
| Mem-Opt 1C/8G | 1 | 8 GB | 50 GB | $40.00 |
| Mem-Opt 2C/16G | 2 | 16 GB | 100 GB | $80.00 |
Prices last checked: June 2026
The CPU Optimized sub-tier at $40/month (2 vCPU / 4 GB) is priced aggressively for dedicated cores. The Memory Optimized tier is the right pick for in-memory databases (Redis, Elasticsearch) or sessions-heavy workloads where RAM per core matters more than raw CPU throughput.
Bare Metal and GPU Pricing
Bare Metal removes the virtualization layer entirely. You get a physical server with no noisy neighbor risk, full hardware access, and predictable performance. Vultr’s Bare Metal range is wide:
| Configuration | Monthly |
|---|---|
| Intel Xeon E3-1270 (4C / 32 GB RAM) | $120.00 |
| AMD EPYC 9255 | $995.00 |
| 2× AMD EPYC 9354 (128C / 2 TB RAM) | $2,925.00 |
| High-end GPU-attached configs | Up to $5,500/mo |
Prices last checked: June 2026
Bare Metal makes sense when you’re dealing with licensing costs that don’t scale well in virtualized environments, strict compliance requirements (PCI-DSS, HIPAA), or latency-sensitive workloads where VM overhead is measurable. The $120/month Xeon entry point is competitive for dedicated hardware.
Cloud GPU (On-Demand, Per GPU/Hour)
Vultr’s GPU pricing is on-demand by the GPU-hour, which suits AI inference and batch training jobs that don’t run 24/7.
| GPU | Per GPU/Hour |
|---|---|
| NVIDIA HGX B200 (192 GB VRAM) | $3.500 |
| AMD MI355X (288 GB) | $2.590 |
| NVIDIA HGX H100 SXM (80 GB) | $2.300 |
| AMD MI325X | $2.000 |
| NVIDIA GH200 | $1.990 |
| NVIDIA L40S | $1.671 |
| AMD MI300X (Bare Metal) | $1.750 |
| NVIDIA A16 (entry) | $0.471 |
Prices last checked: June 2026
The NVIDIA A16 at $0.471/hour is the most accessible GPU option for inference tasks that don’t need a full A100-class card — around $340/month if you run it continuously. The B200 at $3.50/hour is Vultr’s flagship for large model training, coming in at roughly $2,520/month continuous.
Hidden Costs That Could Double Your Vultr Bill
This is the section most Vultr pricing breakdowns skip, and it’s the most important one to read before you deploy anything.
1. Stopped Instances Still Charge You at Full Rate
Vultr’s most counterintuitive billing rule: powering off an instance doesn’t stop the billing. When you stop an instance, Vultr continues charging the full hourly rate because the server still occupies reserved resources — vCPUs, RAM, NVMe storage, and the assigned IPv4 address. The only way to completely stop charges is to destroy the instance.
This catches a lot of people off guard. If you spin up a test server, run your experiments, then “turn it off” through the control panel and forget about it for two weeks, you’ll see two weeks of charges on your next invoice.
2. Automatic Backups Add 20% to Plan Cost
Vultr’s automated backup feature costs an additional 20% of the base instance price. A $24/month High Performance plan becomes $28.80/month with backups enabled. Backups aren’t on by default, but Vultr presents them as a recommended option during deployment — easy to check that box without realizing the ongoing cost.
3. Snapshots Cost $0.05/GB/Month Indefinitely
Snapshots are billed at $0.05/GB/month for as long as they exist. A 100 GB NVMe instance snapshot costs $5/month. These were free prior to October 2021. If you snapshot before major updates and forget to clean up old ones, costs accumulate silently.
4. Bandwidth Overages Are Enforced Hourly, Not Monthly
Vultr introduced account-level bandwidth pooling in January 2023 and set a unified global overage rate of $0.01/GB (inbound is free). That rate sounds low — and it is — but the enforcement mechanism has a sharp edge: overages are calculated hourly, not at the end of the month.
A 2 TB monthly bandwidth allocation works out to roughly 3 GB per hour. Any traffic spike exceeding that threshold in a single hour triggers immediate overage charges. A misconfigured rsync job, a backup sync to an external service, or an unexpected traffic surge can trigger hundreds of dollars in charges before you notice. One Trustpilot reviewer reported $175 in unexpected overage charges across multiple servers from exactly this scenario.
5. Additional IPv4 Addresses — $3/Month Each
Each additional IPv4 address on an instance costs $3/month. Multi-site setups or apps requiring multiple IPs see this compound quickly.
6. Windows Licenses — $16 to $128/Month Overhead
Running Windows on Vultr adds a Microsoft licensing fee of $16–$128/month depending on instance size. On a $5/month or $6/month plan, that’s a 160–260% cost multiplier.
7. Block Storage and Object Storage
- NVMe Block Storage: $0.10/GB/month
- HDD Block Storage: $0.04/GB/month
- Object Storage (Standard): $18/TB/month (price tripled at relaunch in March 2025)
- Object Storage (Accelerated): $100/TB/month
What a “Simple” Web App Actually Costs
| Component | Monthly |
|---|---|
| High Performance 4 GB instance | $24.00 |
| Automatic backups (20%) | $4.80 |
| Load balancer | $12.00 |
| Managed PostgreSQL (1 vCPU / 2 GB) | $36.00 |
| 50 GB NVMe block storage | $5.00 |
| DDoS protection add-on | ~$10.00 |
| Realistic total | ~$91.80/month |
A plan that looks like $24/month becomes a ~$92/month production setup once you add the components a real app needs. Not a scam — these are legitimate services — but the gap between “listed price” and “real cost” is wide enough to matter when budgeting.
Warning: Enable spend alerts in the Vultr billing dashboard and review your snapshot and backup inventory monthly. Orphaned snapshots from old test instances are the most common source of unexpected charges.
How Vultr Pricing Compares to DigitalOcean and Linode
At entry and mid-range, Vultr, DigitalOcean, and Linode are priced tightly against each other. Here’s the actual comparison:
Entry-Level Plans (1 GB RAM)
| Provider | vCPU | Storage | Bandwidth | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vultr Standard | 1 | 25 GB SATA | 1 TB | $5.00 |
| Vultr High Performance | 1 | 25 GB NVMe | 1 TB | $6.00 |
| DigitalOcean | 1 | 25 GB SSD | 1 TB | $6.00 |
| Linode (Akamai) | 1 | 25 GB SSD | 1 TB | $5.00 |
| Hetzner | 2 | 20 GB SSD | 20 TB | ~$4.50 |
Mid-Range Plans (4 GB RAM / 2 vCPU)
| Provider | Storage | Bandwidth | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vultr HP AMD | 100 GB NVMe | 3 TB | $24.00 |
| DigitalOcean | 80 GB SSD | 4 TB | $24.00 |
| Linode (Akamai) | 80 GB SSD | 4 TB | $24.00 |
| Hetzner CX32 | 80 GB SSD | 20 TB | ~$15.00 |
Prices last checked: June 2026
Vultr’s NVMe storage is a genuine advantage at the $24/month tier — 100 GB NVMe versus 80 GB SATA/SSD from DigitalOcean and Linode. Hetzner is the outlier: 20 TB of bandwidth included at $15/month is hard to argue with for European deployments, but Hetzner’s US presence is limited and the latency from North American users to Hetzner’s Germany/Finland data centers is a real constraint for latency-sensitive apps.
For North American workloads, Vultr and DigitalOcean are genuinely neck-and-neck. Vultr wins on storage specs; DigitalOcean wins on ecosystem (marketplace apps, managed databases integration, better beginner documentation).
our full Vultr WordPress setup guide
Which Vultr Plan Should I Pick? Recommendations by Use Case
Here’s where I’ll be direct: the right plan depends on what you’re running. No single tier is “best.”
Personal projects, side experiments, dev environments
Pick: Cloud Compute High Performance 1 GB ($6/month)
Skip the $5/month Standard plan. For $1 more you get NVMe storage and AMD EPYC processors. The standard SATA tier is fine for price-sensitive testing but you’ll feel the storage lag. The HP 1 GB handles a personal portfolio site, a small API endpoint, or a dev environment without breaking a sweat. Enable backups only if losing the instance would hurt — that’s an extra $1.20/month.
WordPress site (under 20k monthly visitors)
Pick: Cloud Compute High Performance 2 GB ($12/month)
The 2 GB RAM cap is the real constraint, not the CPU. WordPress’s PHP process + MySQL + any caching plugin fits comfortably in 2 GB for sites under 20k monthly visitors. Pair it with the vultr $300 free credit promo for new accounts (via tracked referral link) to run three months essentially free while you validate traffic.
Production web app or WordPress site (20k–100k monthly visitors)
Pick: Cloud Compute High Performance 4 GB ($24/month) or VX1 GP NVMe 2C/8G (~$56/month)
The HP 4 GB is the workhorse plan. Geekbench 6 multi-core at 3,513 on AMD EPYC-Genoa, 100 GB NVMe, 3 TB bandwidth. If you need guaranteed CPU performance with no shared-resource contention, step up to the VX1 NVMe 2C/8G at $55.48/month — dedicated cores eliminate the noisy neighbor risk that plagues shared VPS during peak hours.
Don’t forget to read our step-by-step Vultr WordPress setup guide before deploying — the server stack configuration makes a bigger difference than the plan tier for WordPress performance.
High-traffic production workload (100k+ visitors or database-heavy app)
Pick: Optimized Cloud Compute GP 4C/16G ($120/month) or VX1 GP 4C/16G NVMe (~$112/month)
Dedicated resources, full NVMe I/O, and no shared contention. At this scale, the cost difference between VX1 and Optimized Cloud Compute is small enough that you should pick based on your preference for local NVMe (Optimized Cloud) versus block storage flexibility (VX1). Add a managed database ($36/month for PostgreSQL), a load balancer ($12/month), and budget $200+/month total for a properly provisioned production stack.
AI/ML inference or batch training
Pick: Cloud GPU — NVIDIA A16 ($0.471/GPU/hr for inference) or NVIDIA L40S ($1.671/GPU/hr for training)
The A16 is Vultr’s GPU entry point and handles many inference tasks (LLaMA-family models, Stable Diffusion, embedding generation) without the cost of a full H100. For serious model training, the L40S at $1.671/hour is a reasonable middle ground between consumer-grade and H100-tier pricing. Use hourly billing and destroy instances between jobs — don’t leave GPU instances running idle.
Enterprise or compliance-heavy workloads
Pick: Bare Metal (from $120/month)
PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and similar frameworks often require dedicated hardware for specific data types. Vultr’s $120/month Intel Xeon E3-1270 bare metal entry point is accessible for smaller compliance workloads. The $995/month AMD EPYC 9255 is the tier where serious production workloads live.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Vultr charge you if you turn off your server?
Yes. Stopping (powering off) an instance does not stop billing. Vultr continues charging the full hourly rate because your server still occupies reserved vCPUs, RAM, storage, and an IPv4 address. The only way to fully stop charges is to destroy the instance. This is one of Vultr’s most frequently misunderstood billing behaviors and a common source of surprise charges.
What is Vultr’s bandwidth overage fee?
Vultr charges $0.01/GB for bandwidth beyond your plan’s included allocation. Inbound bandwidth is free. Critically, overages are enforced on an hourly basis — your monthly allowance divided by the number of hours, not as a monthly pool. A traffic spike in a single hour can trigger overages even if you’re well within your monthly total at that point.
How much do Vultr backups cost?
Automatic backups cost 20% of the base instance price. A $24/month plan costs $4.80/month for backups ($28.80 total). Snapshots are priced separately at $0.05/GB/month of stored snapshot size.
Is Vultr cheaper than DigitalOcean?
At the entry level, Vultr’s $5/month Standard plan undercuts DigitalOcean’s $6/month Droplet. At the $24/month mid-range tier, they’re identically priced, but Vultr includes 100 GB NVMe vs DigitalOcean’s 80 GB SSD. For European users, Hetzner at ~$15/month with 20 TB bandwidth included is significantly cheaper than both.
What is Vultr VX1?
Vultr VX1 is a dedicated-core AMD EPYC compute tier launched in October 2025. It claims up to 82% better performance-per-dollar versus efficiency-focused hyperscaler ARM alternatives for x86 workloads. Plans start at approximately $43.80/month for a 2 vCPU / 8 GB configuration with block storage. Independent benchmarks broadly support the performance claims for CPU-bound tasks.
Final Verdict: Vultr Is a Solid Pick — With Eyes Open
Vultr’s pricing is genuinely competitive. The High Performance AMD EPYC tier at $6–$96/month offers more NVMe storage than equivalently-priced DigitalOcean Droplets, provisioning under 60 seconds is legitimately fast, and the VX1 tier (if your workload is x86-native) makes a credible case against hyperscaler pricing.
But Vultr is not beginner-friendly billing. The stopped-instance trap will catch you if you’re not paying attention, backups quietly inflate your monthly cost by 20%, and bandwidth overages enforced hourly can spike your bill from a single misconfigured job.
For most developers and small teams running production web workloads: start with the High Performance 4 GB plan at $24/month, skip the automatic backups if you’re taking manual snapshots, set a bandwidth alert at 80% of your allocation, and destroy test instances rather than just powering them off. If you’re a new account, use Vultr’s referral promo link for up to $300 in free credits to get started — it activates automatically through the tracked link rather than requiring a coupon code.
Vultr is the right choice if you want more raw compute for your dollar and you’re comfortable managing your own infrastructure. If you’d prefer guardrails, managed databases with one-click setup, and a more polished support experience, DigitalOcean is worth the near-identical price.
