2026-09-26 · 2 min read
One VPS a day: a six-dollar starting point for a small site
A modest server for a modest workload, and a useful reminder to filter for enough memory before comparing price ratios.
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Today’s candidate: DigitalOcean Basic Regular, 1 GiB
The official base price is $6 per month for 1 shared vCPU, 1 GiB of memory and 25 GiB of SSD storage, with 1,000 GiB of transfer. This is a current-price introduction, not a newly announced promotion. Taxes, optional backups and excess transfer are additional; confirm regional availability and the final bill at checkout. Based on its configuration and shared-CPU positioning, it is a candidate for a low-traffic personal blog, documentation site or lightweight service. We have not benchmarked this plan or tested its network. Memory headroom is limited when a database and several applications need to run together.
A cheaper vCPU ratio is only useful if the app fits
At the base monthly price, each dollar buys approximately 0.167 GiB of memory, 0.167 vCPU and 4.17 GiB of SSD capacity. The $4 option in the same series offers more vCPUs per dollar but only 512 MiB of memory. If your application needs at least 1 GiB, exclude it before sorting. This is a comparison within one series, not a worldwide winner.
Remember the IP address in the comparison
When you need IPv4, include its cost. For example, Hetzner charges an additional $0.60 per month before VAT for a Primary IPv4 address. That is a different provider’s charge, not an extra charge being attributed to the DigitalOcean plan above.