The hidden line items
Sticker prices look similar — the gap shows up after activation.
Bandwidth cap
A €4/month plan with 500 GB/month sounds fine until you find out the overage rate is €5/TB. A €5/month plan with 2 TB included and €1/TB overages is cheaper at scale and far less stressful.
IPv4 inclusion
- v4vm: 1 IPv4 included on every plan, additional IPv4 at €1.50/month.
- Some competitors: 1 IPv4 only on plans ≥4 GB, then €3–5/month each.
If you need 4 IPs for blue/green or rotating outbound, that delta dominates the plan price.
Bandwidth burst speed
"1 Gbps" sometimes means burst, sometimes sustained. Run `iperf3` against a public server right after provisioning — if you can't, your provider is shaping below the advertised number.
Snapshot pricing
Snapshots can add up. €0.05/GB/month sounds tiny; on a 100 GB VPS that's €5/month. Some hosts (us included) charge nothing for keeping a couple of recent snapshots.
SLA + support
"99.9% uptime" without a credit clause is marketing. Read the SLA — what do you actually get back if a hypervisor goes down for 4 hours? On v4vm: a pro-rated service credit applied to your next invoice automatically.
A sanity benchmark
On a fresh small plan you should see, give or take 20%:
- `dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct` → 400 MB/s or better
- `sysbench cpu --threads=1 run` → 1500+ events/s
- A round-trip to `1.1.1.1` under 5 ms from any major EU city
If a "cheap" plan misses two of those, the price isn't actually cheap.