Cloud Hosting Costs Compared: What Your Setup Really Costs on Five Hosts

The same two web servers and a database can cost $84 a month at one host and $147 at another. List prices hide the differences: what counts as a CPU, how much traffic is included, what a load balancer or a backup adds. This calculator prices one setup at five hosts using the same rules for each, so the numbers line up.

Describe your setup

There are two ways to describe what you want to run.

The form covers the common case: a number of identical web servers, an optional database, a load balancer, monthly bandwidth, a region and backups.

A Mermaid diagram suits anything with more parts. Paste a flowchart and add one comment line per node to size it:

%% @web  type=vm cpu=2 ram=4 disk=50 count=2
%% @db   type=db engine=postgres cpu=2 ram=4 disk=100
%% @env  bandwidth=1 region=us-east backups=true

Mermaid ignores comment lines, so the diagram still renders cleanly. A node without a line gets a guess based on its shape and label: a cylinder is a database, a label containing “load balancer” is a load balancer, and “bucket” or “storage” means block storage. Users and clients are left out. Every guess is listed under the diagram, where you can correct it before you rely on the quote.

How each component is priced

For every host, each server or database gets the cheapest plan with at least the vCPU and RAM you asked for in your region. If that plan has less disk than you need, the gap is added as a block-storage volume, at least 10 GB because that is the smallest volume every host sells. The component’s cost is the plan price plus the volume, times the number of copies.

On top of the servers:

• Load balancer: the host’s managed load balancer at its monthly list price.
• IPv4 addresses: Hetzner charges for these separately, at $0.60 per server a month. The other four include one.
• Bandwidth: each plan includes some outbound traffic. Anything above the combined allowance is charged at the host’s overage rate, which ranges from $1.20 per TB at Hetzner to $90 per TB at Lightsail.
• Backups: 20% of the server cost at DigitalOcean, Hetzner and Vultr, a flat fee per plan at Linode, and snapshot storage at Lightsail.

The total is the sum of those lines. The yearly figure is the monthly total times 12. Reserved-instance and prepaid discounts are not included.

What the flags mean

Two quotes can be the same size on paper and still not be equivalent. A ⚠ on a row means one of these applies:

• Shared CPU: the plan’s cores are shared with other customers, or burstable as on Lightsail.
• Oversized: the closest plan has at least twice the CPU or RAM you asked for, so you are paying for room you may not use.
• Self-managed database: you asked for a managed database. Managed database pricing is not modeled yet, so the quote prices a server you would run the database on yourself.
• Region gap: the host has no data center in your region, so the nearest one was used.
• Bandwidth heavy: traffic overage is more than 30% of the bill. Look hard at hosts with bigger allowances.

An example

Take the default diagram: two web servers with 2 vCPU and 4 GB each, a 2 vCPU / 4 GB Postgres server with 100 GB of disk, a load balancer, 1 TB of traffic and backups, in US East. With prices as of October 2026:

Move the same setup to Frankfurt and Hetzner drops to about $95, into second place. Raise traffic to 10 TB a month on a single server and the order flips: Hetzner is cheapest and Lightsail costs more than ten times as much, almost all of it in overage.

From quote to servers

Each row has two buttons. Deploy opens the host’s site. Terraform downloads a main.tf that describes the quoted servers, extra volumes, load balancer and backups for that host, with provider versions pinned. Add your API token and SSH public key as variables, run terraform plan, read what it will create, then apply.

What this doesn’t tell you

Prices are list prices in US dollars before tax, credits and promotions. They come from each host’s published price list and are checked by hand, so the date under the results matters. Managed databases, Kubernetes, object storage requests and CDN traffic are not priced yet. Support, network quality and how each host handles an outage don’t fit in a price table either, and they can matter more than a few dollars a month.

Rankings are by price alone. Some Deploy links may become affiliate links, which can earn this site a commission at no cost to you. A commission never changes the order. See the affiliate disclosure.

Everything runs in your browser. Your setup, diagram and quote are never sent to a server.

This article is for informational purposes only. See our disclaimer.