What hosting actually costs, as opposed to what it is advertised at.
A static site comparing hosting providers on the numbers that decide a real bill: cost per unit of RAM, what outbound traffic costs once you exceed the included allowance, and what the price becomes in year two when the promotional rate ends.
Five pages, one chart each:
| Page | Question it answers |
|---|---|
| VPS cost | What does a gigabyte of RAM cost per month, across nine providers |
| Egress | What does 1 TB of monthly outbound traffic cost, from zero to EUR 149 |
| Year two | How much does the bill multiply when the introductory rate ends |
| All-in | Base plan plus traffic, which reorders the ranking |
| Jurisdiction | Which legal system can compel each provider, and who has published a statement about it |
Every figure carries the date it was captured and links to the provider's own page.
Prices for Akamai, Vultr, Scaleway and Microsoft Azure are refreshed daily from those providers' public pricing APIs. Everything else is a dated manual capture. Each figure is marked with which it is and how old it is, so a stale number is visible rather than silently wrong. A failed refresh keeps the previous value and marks it stale; it never blanks a figure.
Where a value could not be established it says so. A blank is never rendered as a zero, and a provider whose figures we could not obtain never ranks first by virtue of being undocumented.
uv sync
uv run python site/build.py # writes site/dist
uv run python pricing/fetch_live.py # refreshes research/live-prices.json
The build needs Python 3.12 and Jinja2. No JavaScript, no framework, no build toolchain. The site is complete and readable with JavaScript disabled.
| Path | Contents |
|---|---|
site/build.py |
The generator |
site/templates/ |
Jinja2 templates |
site/static/ |
Stylesheet and self-hosted fonts |
research/ |
The data the site is built from |
pricing/fetch_live.py |
Daily refresh from provider pricing APIs |
Figures change and pages move. If something here is wrong, open an issue with the provider, the figure, and a link to the page that contradicts it.
Code is MIT. The compiled data in research/ is CC-BY-4.0: use it with
attribution to hostlaws.com. Underlying prices and terms belong to the providers
and are cited to their own pages throughout.