01
Always on
Agents that watch inboxes, tickets, or markets cannot live on a lid that closes. A VPS does not sleep, and you can reboot it on a schedule you control.
Always-on agent hosting
Your laptop sleeps.
Your agent should not.
A cheap VPS is the boring way to keep an AI worker online 24/7 — queue, browser, cron, webhooks — without renting a GPU or paying a managed-agent markup. This site is a price sheet and a spec picker, not a hosting company.
Why a VPS for AI agents
Chat UIs time out. Serverless functions time out. A phone in a drawer is not a server. If the job is “stay up, poll, act, write state,” you want a small Linux box with a public IP.
02
Cheap on purpose
Most agents talk to a hosted model API. They need RAM and disk, not an H100. Four to eight gigabytes is the usual band. That is a $6–$12 problem, not a $200 problem.
03
Yours to break
Root access, Docker, backups, a firewall. When a vendor templates an “AI VPS,” you still pay for the VM. Keep the VM; skip the mascot.
RAM / CPU / cost calculator
Client-side only. It matches this week’s sheet, not a live API. Treat the numbers as a floor — leave headroom for logs, browsers, and a bad leak.
RAM to buy
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vCPU to buy
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Disk (app)
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Sheet range
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Matching plans this week (cheapest first). Hostinger shows the 24-month intro; Hetzner includes IPv4.
Weekly comparison table
Sourced 26 Aug 2026. Sorted by effective monthly USD. Em dashes mean we could not confirm that cell on a fetched page, so we left it blank instead of guessing.
| Vendor | Plan | vCPU | RAM | Disk | Transfer | Effective $/mo | Billing |
|---|
Hostinger effective price is the 24-month prepaid average shown on their VPS page; renewal is listed in orange. Hetzner effective price is the published USD cap plus $0.60 IPv4. Sources live in js/prices.js.
A kit, not a server
If you already know you want a 4–8 GB box, the Always-On Agent Host Kit is a $29 one-time packet: spec explainer, generic Docker Compose, backup checklist, and this price sheet. Hosting itself is still ~$9/mo at a vendor you pick.