Europe is the best continent on Earth for cheap VPS — German and French providers sell serious hardware at prices that would be impossible in the US. But the budget market has a dark side: oversold nodes, ancient CPUs and "unmetered" bandwidth with hidden throttles. We bought the cheapest usable plan from six providers and ran them for 60 days.
The contenders (all under €7/month)
1. Hetzner CX22 — €4.5/mo — the benchmark
2 vCPU (AMD EPYC), 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe, 20 TB traffic. Performance is consistent week after week, the console rescue system is excellent, and hourly billing means you can test for pennies. The only friction is ID verification and no PayPal for new accounts.
2. Netcup RS series — €5-6/mo — hidden gem
German provider with a cult following. The RS 1000 G9 gives you dedicated cores (not shared!), 8 GB RAM and root on a managed platform. Panel is dated, performance is superb.
3. Contabo — €5.99/mo — most RAM per euro
4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 200 GB SSD — the spec sheet is unbeatable. In practice, CPU steal reaches 30-50% during EU evening peaks. Fine for storage, dev environments and non-critical apps; risky for latency-sensitive production.
4. Hostinger VPS 1 — €4.99/mo — easiest for beginners
Weekly off-site backups included, a clean panel, and better US-EU routing than most budget hosts. Specs are modest (1 vCPU, 4 GB) but honest.
5. Scaleway Stardust — pay-per-hour — best for experiments
True cloud billing to the second with EU datacentres. Tiny instances cost cents per day; scale up when the experiment becomes a product.
6. OVHcloud VPS Starter — €3.5/mo — best DDoS protection
OVH's proprietary anti-DDoS is the best in the budget segment — essential for game servers. One IPv4 included, extra IPs reasonably priced.
Side-by-side
| Provider | Price | vCPU/RAM | Consistency* | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hetzner | €4.5 | 2 / 4 GB | Excellent | Everything EU |
| Netcup | €5.5 | 1 ded. / 8 GB | Excellent | Databases, long-term |
| Contabo | €6.0 | 4 / 8 GB | Poor | Storage, labs |
| Hostinger | €5.0 | 1 / 4 GB | Good | Beginners |
| Scaleway | Variable | Scales | Good | Experiments |
| OVH | €3.5 | 1 / 2 GB | Good | Game servers |
*CPU consistency measured over 60 days via nightly sysbench runs.
Verdict
Default to Hetzner; pick Netcup if you want dedicated cores; use Contabo knowing its limits; choose OVH if DDoS is a real threat. Then lock the server down using our SSH hardening checklist.