Affiliate disclosure - this article contains a Contabo affiliate link. If you order through it we earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It does not change the figures below: every price was read on the host's own pricing page on 9 August 2026, and what could not be read is marked as such.
Short answer: for a WireGuard endpoint, the advertised price is the wrong number to compare. Two line items decide the real cost, and neither appears in the headline figure: whether a public IPv4 address is included, and whether the host reserves the right to throttle you. On those two criteria, OVHcloud VPS-1 (4.54 $ before tax, dedicated IPv4 included, 500 Mbit/s) and Contabo Cloud VPS 4 (5.40 € including tax, IPv4 included, but 24-month commitment and throttling reserved) come out ahead of a sticker price four times lower.
The comparison, as read on 9 August 2026
| Host | Entry plan | Advertised price | vCPU / RAM / storage | Traffic | Public IPv4 | Setup fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Contabo | Cloud VPS 4 | 5.40 € incl. tax (24-month effective rate) | 4 / 8 GB / 100 GB SSD | "Unlimited", fair use, 200 Mbit/s | Included | None listed |
| Hetzner | CX23 | 5.49 € excl. tax | 2 / 4 GB / 40 GB NVMe | not readable | +0.50 €/mo | None listed |
| OVHcloud | VPS-1 | 4.54 $ before tax | 2 / 4 GB / 40 GB NVMe | "Unlimited", 500 Mbit/s | Included | None listed |
| Netcup | VPS 500 G12 | 5.91 € incl. tax (≈4.97 € excl.) | 2 / 4 GB DDR5 ECC / 128 GB NVMe | "Included", no figure | not verified | Not mentioned |
| Scaleway | STARDUST1-S | ≈0.43 €/mo excl. tax | 1 / 1 GB | Egress included, 100 Mbit/s | +≈2.92 €/mo | Not mentioned |
| IONOS | VPS M+ | 9 € excl. tax (3 € for 3 months) | 4 / 4 GB / 120 GB NVMe | "Unlimited", 1 Gbit/s | 1 included | 10 € |
| Oracle | Always Free | 0 € | 2 OCPU / 12 GB (Arm A1.Flex) | 10 TB/month outbound | not verified | None |
Why the cheapest line is not the cheapest VPN
Scaleway makes the point better than any argument. STARDUST1-S is the lowest sticker price here by a wide margin — and Scaleway's own pricing page states that list prices exclude attached public IPv4 addresses. That address costs roughly 2.92 €/month, about seven times the instance itself. Real total: around 3.35 €/month, for 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM and a 100 Mbit/s port. Still inexpensive, but no longer the bargain the headline suggests, and thin for anything beyond one user.
Hetzner has the same structure with a much smaller gap: 0.50 €/month for the IPv4 on top of 5.49 € excluding tax. Worth knowing, not decisive.
Contabo advertises the most resources per euro of this comparison — 4 vCPU and 8 GB at 5.40 € including tax — with two caveats we state plainly. That figure is the effective rate on a 24-month commitment, not a no-commitment monthly price; we could not find the no-commitment price. And Contabo explicitly reserves the right to throttle servers with exceptionally high or disruptive usage patterns, with the port capped at 200 Mbit/s. No fair-use threshold is published, so this is a documented reservation, not a measured limit.
Oracle Always Free is the only genuinely free option, and generous on paper: 10 TB of outbound traffic per month. Its constraint is structural rather than financial — Always Free resources can only be created in your account's home region, chosen at sign-up and not changeable afterwards. For a VPN, that fixes your exit country permanently. If you want a UK IP next year and you signed up in Frankfurt, you start a new account.
Choosing by what you actually need
A personal VPN, one or two devices, exit country fixed. Oracle Always Free costs nothing and its traffic allowance is far beyond a personal need. Accept the fixed home region, or do not use it.
A personal VPN with a choice of country, and no commitment. OVHcloud VPS-1 has the lowest verified price with a dedicated IPv4 included and a 500 Mbit/s port. Note the price is displayed on the .com site and varies by country and currency.
A household or small team, several simultaneous users. Contabo Cloud VPS 4 gives the most headroom for the money (4 vCPU, 8 GB), provided a 24-month commitment suits you and the 200 Mbit/s port is enough. This is also the profile where the throttling reservation deserves reading before you commit.
You want no commitment and a well-documented network. Hetzner CX23, remembering to add the 0.50 € IPv4.
Whichever you pick, the setup itself is the same everywhere: our WireGuard on a VPS, step by step walks through it, and our cheapest-VPS comparison goes deeper on price alone if that is your only criterion.
What we could not verify, and why it matters
An honest comparison publishes its gaps. These are ours, as of 9 August 2026:
- Hetzner's included traffic per plan — the product pages render prices in JavaScript and returned HTTP 429 on retry. A search result claiming 20 TB and a 2.99-3.49 € price is contradicted by Hetzner's own price-adjustment documentation (5.49 €), so we discarded it rather than repeat it.
- Netcup's traffic figure, throttling policy, bandwidth and whether IPv4 is included — the product pages say only "traffic included".
- Contabo's no-commitment monthly price and the numeric fair-use threshold.
- Oracle's number of free public IPv4 addresses.
- The terms of service of all seven hosts. We read none of them, so we make no claim about whether any of them permits or restricts running a VPN. That is the gap most likely to matter to you: check the acceptable-use policy of the host you choose, particularly if others will use the endpoint.
Prices change, and several of these are commitment or promotional rates. Re-read the pricing page before you order — this comparison is a snapshot, dated on purpose.
★ Nuremberg GDPR datacenter · ✓ Dedicated IPv4 included · 200+ Mbps guaranteed
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