BuyVM (FranTech) KVM VPS: $2/Month Unmetered Bandwidth, Built-In DDoS Protection, and Block Storage That Actually Makes Sense
There's a type of VPS provider that keeps showing up in every budget hosting forum, every "best cheap VPS" thread, every Discord channel where nerds argue about servers at 2am. BuyVM — the consumer brand of FranTech Solutions — is that provider. Has been since 2010. That kind of staying power in budget hosting doesn't happen by accident.
So what's actually going on here, and is it worth your time in 2026?
FranTech Solutions is the company. BuyVM is the brand. They're run by a small team that owns their own hardware, runs their own network, and built their own control panel from scratch. When something breaks, there's no finger-pointing at a third party — they own the whole stack.
Data centers are in Las Vegas, New York, Miami, and Luxembourg. Good US coverage plus a reasonable European option.
The core product is their Dedicated KVM Slice lineup — full KVM virtual machines, not OpenVZ containers where a neighbor's runaway process tanks your performance. Your resources are yours.
| Plan | CPU | RAM | SSD | Bandwidth | Monthly Price | Order |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Slice 512 | 1 Core (Fair Share) | 512 MB | 10 GB | Unmetered 1Gbps | $2.00/mo ($24/yr) | Order |
| Slice 1024 | 1 Core (Fair Share) | 1 GB | 20 GB | Unmetered 1Gbps | $3.50/mo | Order |
| Slice 2048 | 1 Core (Fair Share) | 2 GB | 40 GB | Unmetered 1Gbps | $7.00/mo | Order |
| Slice 4096 | 1 Core (Dedicated) | 4 GB | 80 GB | Unmetered 1Gbps | $15.00/mo | Order |
| High-Vol 8GB | 2 Cores (Dedicated) | 8 GB | 160 GB | Unmetered 1Gbps | $30.00/mo | Order |
| High-Vol 12GB | 3 Cores (Dedicated) | 12 GB | 240 GB | Unmetered 1Gbps | $45.00/mo | Order |
| High-Vol 16GB | 4 Cores (Dedicated) | 16 GB | 320 GB | Unmetered 1Gbps | $60.00/mo | Order |
All plans include a free DirectAdmin license, 5 free snapshots per location, 1 IPv4 address, and a /48 IPv6 block. Every plan supports Windows (free license included), Docker, custom ISOs, and BSD variants.
Starting with the Slice 4096, CPU usage shifts from "fair share" to dedicated — meaning your cores aren't competing with neighbors.
"Unmetered" in hosting usually means "unmetered until you hit our soft cap buried in clause 14.7b." BuyVM's unmetered means a genuine 1Gbps port with no per-gigabyte charges and no soft caps. For seedboxes, Plex servers, media archives, backup destinations, or anything that moves data constantly, this changes the math completely.
DigitalOcean's 4GB plan comes in around $40/month with 4TB of bandwidth. BuyVM's 4GB Slice (Slice 4096) is $15/month with genuinely unlimited bandwidth. The math isn't close.
👉 See current plan availability
Visit any VPS forum and you'll see BuyVM regulars bring up Block Storage Slabs with disproportionate enthusiasm. Here's the deal:
- $1.25/month per 256 GB of NVMe-cached block storage
- Attach it to your VPS like an external drive
- Connect via InfiniBand RDMA — performance behaves like locally-attached storage, not a network share
- Detach from one VPS and attach to another in the same datacenter, no downtime, no reboots
So a terabyte of extra storage is $5/month. Ten terabytes is $50/month. Compare that to what S3 or any major cloud charges for equivalent storage.
If you're running backups, a Plex library, a seedbox, or anything storage-heavy, the combination of a cheap Slice + Block Storage Slabs is genuinely hard to beat. Add-on storage from the same panel you use to manage everything else.
BuyVM runs their own DDoS filtering. Not a white-labeled third-party service — their own equipment, their own filtering systems, 500+ Gbps of capacity, covering Layer 4 through Layer 7 attacks.
The add-on cost: $3.00/month per protected IP.
DigitalOcean charges around $10/month for DDoS protection capped at 10 Gbps. Vultr is similar. BuyVM's protection goes deeper and costs less than a fast food lunch per month. If you're running anything public-facing — a game server, a small web service, anything — this matters.
Most budget VPS hosts install SolusVM or Virtualizor and leave you with it. BuyVM built their own panel called Stallion. What that means in practice:
- Start, stop, reboot your server with one click
- Real-time CPU, RAM, and bandwidth monitoring
- Configure IPs, reverse DNS, failover IPs, and Anycast addresses
- Manage snapshots and choose from 100+ OS templates
- SolusVM-compatible API for automation
It's not the prettiest dashboard you've ever seen. But it's built and maintained by the same team running the infrastructure, so when something breaks they fix it themselves instead of waiting on a ticket queue.
| Add-On | Price |
|---|---|
| Block Storage Slab (256 GB) | $1.25/mo |
| Block Storage Slab (512 GB) | $2.50/mo |
| Block Storage Slab (1 TB) | $5.00/mo |
| DDoS Protected IP | $3.00/mo per IP |
| Automated Nightly Backups | 10% of base plan/mo (e.g., $0.50/mo on Slice 512 or 1024) |
| Offloaded MySQL Server | $1.00/mo |
Backups run every night and keep 7 days of retention. At $0.50/month on the entry plans, it's basically free peace of mind.
Good fit:
- Self-hosters who want a personal VPN, Plex server, or home lab node
- Developers who need cheap persistent infrastructure for testing or staging
- Anyone running a seedbox, backup destination, or high-bandwidth service
- People who want real KVM — not containers — at budget prices
- Anyone building out storage-heavy projects with Block Storage Slabs
Not a great fit:
- People who need managed hosting or hand-holding on server config
- Anyone who needs instant 24/7 phone support for a mission-critical production environment
- Users who can't wait out occasional stock shortages at popular locations
One honest note: BuyVM limits overselling to protect performance, which means popular plans at popular locations go out of stock. If you see a plan with availability, that's your signal to move.
BuyVM's Trustpilot page sits around 3.9–4.0 out of 5 from nearly 920 reviews — which for a budget host with opinionated customers is a solid score.
The consistent positives: price is unbeatable, support responds faster than expected, and long-term customers stick around for years. One reviewer mentioned running 13 separate virtual servers with BuyVM after seven-plus years as a customer. There's also an active Discord community where staff and longtime users field questions quickly — often faster than a formal ticket.
The legitimate criticisms: stock at popular locations sells out, and block storage has had occasional reliability issues that some users found frustrating. The support ticket experience has been inconsistent for some. These are real trade-offs to know about going in.
| Provider | RAM | CPU | Bandwidth | Price/Month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BuyVM Slice 4096 | 4 GB | 1 Dedicated Core | Unmetered | $15.00 |
| DigitalOcean | 4 GB | 2 Cores | 4 TB | ~$40.00 |
| Linode / Akamai | 4 GB | 2 Cores | 4 TB | ~$20.00 |
| Vultr | 4 GB | 4 Cores | 4 TB | ~$40.00 |
| AWS EC2 (t3.medium) | 4 GB | 2 vCPUs | Metered extra | ~$37+ |
BuyVM is the only one in that list with genuinely unmetered bandwidth and no per-GB storage or bandwidth charges tacked on after the fact.
👉 Start with BuyVM — check current plan availability
BuyVM isn't trying to win on marketing. The website looks like engineers built it while focused on not breaking anything. But the combination of $2/month entry pricing, genuinely unmetered 1Gbps bandwidth, $1.25/month block storage, and in-house DDoS filtering at $3/month creates a value stack that's legitimately hard to match in 2026.
If you know what SSH is and want a server that works consistently without paying cloud-giant prices, BuyVM is worth a look.