VPS Pricing Calculator

How self-hosted VPS pricing works in 2026

Self-hosting a Next.js app on a VPS means paying a fixed monthly fee for compute — no per-request, per-invocation, or egress charges. Commodity VPS pricing in 2026 sits at $7–10/month for a shared small instance, $15–20/month for a dedicated medium instance, and $30–60/month for larger dedicated instances. Bandwidth is typically included in the VPS price up to a generous monthly cap (20 TB on most European providers).

Put Cloudflare's free plan in front of your VPS and you get DDoS protection, global CDN caching, and SSL termination at zero cost. Most static assets and cached pages never reach your server. This combination — cheap VPS + free Cloudflare layer — is what makes self-hosting so cost-competitive at scale.

What self-hosting actually costs teams

The sticker price is low. The hidden cost is operational time. Expect to spend 2–4 hours/month on security updates, log review, backup verification, and occasional debugging. Tools like Coolify (open source) give you Git-push deploys, preview URLs, and one-click databases — closing most of the DX gap with Vercel and Railway. Add ~$5–15/month for managed monitoring (Better Stack) and transactional email (Resend) if you want them off your plate.

Database is the other variable. You can run Postgres on the same VPS for free, or add a managed provider: typical pricing is $0 (free tier, limited), $25/month (starter managed), $50–100/month (production with daily backups and read replicas), and $600+/month at high scale.

VPS pricing examples

Hobby project (5k visitors/mo): Small shared VPS (~$7) + Cloudflare free + self-hosted Postgres. $7/month total.

Startup SaaS (50k visitors, 400k API calls/mo): Medium dedicated VPS (~$15) + Cloudflare free + managed DB (~$25). $40/month total. Compare: Vercel Pro starts at $20 plus usage; Railway starts at $20 plus compute.

Growing SaaS (250k visitors, 5M API calls/mo): Large VPS (~$30) + Cloudflare free + managed DB (~$50). $80/month total. Vercel Pro at this scale typically runs $150–300/month in combined bandwidth and function costs.

Scale (1.5M visitors, 45M API calls/mo): XL VPS or two large instances with load balancer (~$60–120) + Cloudflare free + managed DB at scale (~$600). $660–720/month. At this scale, serverless platforms can cost $1,000–3,000/month in edge requests and compute alone.

VPS providers to consider

Pricing is benchmarked against commodity European VPS providers. Compare offers from:

• Hetzner Cloud — best price-to-performance in Europe; US locations available.
• OVH VPS — competitive pricing, strong European presence.
• DigitalOcean Droplets — excellent documentation, straightforward billing, US-friendly.

How this calculator works

VPS tier is selected based on your estimated monthly API request volume and bandwidth. Cloudflare CDN is modeled as free. The database add-on cost is estimated by visitor volume and database storage size — it is not counted in the headline total since it is optional and workload-specific. Adjust the workload inputs to match your real traffic and see how the tier recommendation changes.

Frequently asked questions

Is self-hosting cheaper than Vercel?

Almost always at medium-to-high traffic. A $15/month VPS handles workloads that would cost $150–300/month on Vercel Pro once edge requests, function invocations, and Active CPU are included. At hobby scale (under 5k visitors), the difference is smaller and the ops overhead may not be worth it.

What is the cheapest way to host a Next.js app?

A small shared VPS ($7/month) with Cloudflare's free plan in front is the cheapest production-grade option. Self-hosted Postgres on the same VPS keeps the database free. Total cost: $7/month for most small SaaS apps.

Do I need DevOps experience to self-host?

Basic Linux comfort is enough for most setups. Tools like Coolify automate deployments, SSL renewal, and container management via a web UI. You don't need to write Nginx configs or manage systemd services. The main ongoing task is applying OS security updates.

How does self-hosting compare to Railway?

Railway is container-based like a VPS but managed — no SSH, no patching, automatic deploys. Railway runs $20–60/month for typical SaaS workloads. A comparable VPS runs $15–30/month, saving 30–50%. Railway is worth the premium if you want zero ops overhead; VPS is worth the savings if you're comfortable with 2–4 hours/month of maintenance.