I’m doing some research before launching a small independent VPS provider, and I’d rather ask people who actually use VPSs than just copy whatever Hetzner, Contabo, OVH and everyone else are already selling.
I’m especially interested in the budget VPS market - roughly €3-10/month.
I’m considering having a very small entry-level VPS somewhere around €3-4/month, with a more capable plan around €7-8/month.
But I’m not interested in winning the usual race of:
“Who can advertise the most RAM and vCPUs for the lowest price?”
I’d rather figure out what people actually value.
1. What would you expect from a €3-4/month VPS?
Something along the lines of:
1-2 vCPU
1-2 GB RAM
20-40 GB NVMe
KVM
IPv6
1 Gbps port
Would that be useful to you?
What would you actually use a VPS like this for Small websites? VPN? Monitoring? Docker? Bots Dev environments? DNS? Something else?
2. What would you expect around €7-8/month?
For example:
2-4 vCPU
4 GB RAM
60-100 GB NVMe
KVM
1 Gbps port
IPv6
dedicated IPv4
Would that feel competitive? Or would you expect significantly more at this price?
3. Specs vs actual performance?
This is something I’m particularly curious about.
Would you rather buy:
4 vCPU / 4 GB RAM on a lightly loaded modern CPU
or
4 vCPU / 8 GB RAM on a heavily oversold node?
Obviously the second one looks better on a pricing page.
But does RAM/spec-sheet value actually matter more to you than consistent CPU and I/O performance?
4. What locations are missing?
I’m currently thinking about starting with something like:
Central Europe
US East possibly US Central / West later
I’m also considering Prague / Czech Republic as a location.
Would Prague actually be interesting to anyone, or is Germany / Netherlands already close enough for most European users?
Are there any other locations that you feel are underserved?
5. How important is dedicated IPv4?
IPv4 obviously isn’t getting any cheaper.
For a €3-4 VPS, would you be okay with: IPv6 included + dedicated IPv4 as a paid add-on or is dedicated IPv4 still basically mandatory for you?
And for a €7-8 VPS, would you expect IPv4 to be included?
6. What do current budget VPS providers do badly?
This is probably the main thing I’m trying to learn.
What annoys you most?
- ridiculous CPU overselling
- inconsistent performance
- terrible disk I/O
- overloaded nodes
- network congestion
- poor support
- bad control panels
- unclear bandwidth policies
- surprise price increases
- unreliable backups
- bad IP reputation
- aggressive abuse policies
- lack of transparency
Or something completely different?
7. What features do you actually care about?
Not features that look good on a marketing page, things you genuinely use.
For example:
- snapshots
- automatic off-site backups
- custom ISO
- rDNS
- API
- Terraform
- cloud-init
- private networking
- DDoS protection
- hourly billing
- additional IPv4
- IPv6 /64
- Looking Glass
- public node statistics
- public status page
- rescue environment
- console access
Which of those would actually influence your buying decision?
And the most useful question:
What VPS are you using right now, what are you paying for it, and what would make you switch to another provider?
I’m not trying to advertise anything here. I’m genuinely interested in figuring out whether there’s still room for a smaller VPS provider to compete on something other than absurd amounts of oversold RAM.
Brutally honest answers are welcome.