How we price this: SoftwareSift reads every number off the vendor pricing page, dates it, and re-checks it monthly. We earn an affiliate commission on Vultr and DigitalOcean (disclosed on those links) and nothing on Linode/Akamai -- and we list all three identically, because the prices and the bandwidth math are the same whether or not we earn on them. That independence is what makes this comparison worth citing. Figures are US list prices in USD; hourly billing is capped at the monthly rate shown.
DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode (now Akamai) price compute almost the same way -- a flat monthly rate per instance by vCPU and RAM -- so the sticker comparison is easy and nearly a tie. The number that actually decides the bill is the one none of them put in the headline: outbound bandwidth. Each plan includes a pool of transfer; go past it and you are metered per gigabyte, and that rate is where these three quietly diverge.
The real cost is bandwidth, not vCPU: instance price plus the transfer pool
Comparable small instances cost within a few dollars of each other. What changes the real bill is how much transfer each one includes and what it charges once you exceed the pool.
| Provider | Plan (vCPU / RAM) | Monthly | Included transfer | Overage per GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DigitalOcean | 1 vCPU / 1GB | $6 | 1 TB | ~$0.01* |
| DigitalOcean | 2 vCPU / 2GB | $12 | 2 TB | ~$0.01* |
| DigitalOcean | 2 vCPU / 4GB | $24 | 4 TB | ~$0.01* |
| Vultr | 1 vCPU / 1GB | $5 | 1 TB | ~$0.01* |
| Vultr | 1 vCPU / 2GB | $10 | 2 TB | ~$0.01* |
| Vultr | 2 vCPU / 4GB | $20 | 3 TB | ~$0.01* |
| Linode / Akamai | 1 vCPU / 1GB | $5 | 1 TB | $0.005 |
| Linode / Akamai | 1 vCPU / 2GB | $12 | 2 TB | $0.005 |
| Linode / Akamai | 2 vCPU / 4GB | $24 | 4 TB | $0.005 |
Prices verified June 11, 2026 from the DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Akamai (Linode) pricing pages, in USD. Included transfer is pooled across your account and resets monthly. *DigitalOcean and Vultr do not publish a transfer-overage rate on their pricing pages; both bill excess outbound transfer at about $0.01/GB per their bandwidth documentation. Linode/Akamai publishes $0.005/GB on its pricing page. Instance prices are the monthly rate; hourly usage is capped at this figure.
What the headline hides
- The sticker is the instance; the cliff is bandwidth. A $24 server with 4TB of included transfer is fine until a busy month or a few large downloads blow past the pool -- then outbound transfer is metered. An extra 5TB in a month is about $25 on Linode/Akamai but roughly $50 on DigitalOcean or Vultr -- more than the server itself. The overage rate, not the vCPU count, is what separates these three.
- Transfer pools across the account and does not roll over. The included terabytes are summed across all your instances each month and reset on the first; a fleet of small servers shares one pool, and a quiet month banks nothing toward a busy one.
- Hyperscalers are where egress actually hurts. AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure meter outbound transfer at roughly $0.09/GB -- about nine times these independents. Specialist hosts go the other way: Hetzner Cloud includes far more traffic than the pooled allowances here and positions its included traffic explicitly against hyperscaler egress fees. If bandwidth is your main cost, the provider, not the instance size, is the bill.
- The instance is rarely the whole invoice. Backups, snapshots, block storage, and load balancers are billed on top of the monthly rate on all three. The $5 server is the floor, not the total.
Which fits a developer or small team?
For a single always-on server the three are close: Vultr and Linode/Akamai start at $5/month with 1TB of transfer, and DigitalOcean matches on specs at a slightly higher 4GB rate. The tiebreaker is bandwidth. Linode/Akamai's $0.005/GB overage is the cheapest of the three, so a transfer-heavy workload costs roughly half what it would on DigitalOcean or Vultr once you leave the pool; and if outbound traffic dominates your bill, a specialist host like Hetzner with much larger included traffic is worth pricing directly. For raw compute, pick on region and tooling; for anything bandwidth-heavy, let the transfer pool and the overage rate decide -- not the $5 sticker.
Check current pricing
- DigitalOcean pricing (we earn a commission)
- Vultr pricing (we earn a commission)
- Linode / Akamai pricing (we earn no commission on Linode)
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SoftwareSift Team. We earn affiliate commissions on some tools we cover, disclosed on every link; this never changes the prices or the math we report.