V VPS for Agents

Comparison

Self-hosting always-on AI agents

26 August 2026 · Prices as of that date. Not affiliated with the vendors named below.

If an agent has to survive a closed laptop lid, you are shopping for a VPS whether the landing page says “cloud GPU” or not. This is a comparison of four boring virtual machines for that job.

The job is uptime, not FLOPS

Most “AI agents” in 2026 are a loop plus a hosted model. The loop polls a mailbox, a Git host, a CRM, or a calendar. It writes a little state. It calls an API. It may open a browser. None of that wants an H100. It wants a process that is still running at 03:00, a public IP that does not change every hotel Wi-Fi, and a disk that still has last week’s SQLite file.

Three common substitutes fail in different ways:

  • A laptop. Sleep, NAT, and “I took it through TSA” are not SLOs.
  • Serverless. Timeouts, cold starts, and no durable local browser profile. Fine for a single webhook. Poor for a worker that holds a Playwright session open.
  • A managed “agent cloud.” You still pay for compute. You also pay for someone else’s opinion about which runtime you are allowed to run.

A small KVM or Xen VM is the adult default. The rest of this article is which small VM, at which price, for which RAM band.

How to read the prices

We fetched vendor pages on 26 August 2026. The live table is on the homepage and in js/prices.js, with source URLs. A few reading rules so the cheap number does not lie:

  • Hostinger KVM advertises a monthly-looking rate that is the 24-month prepaid total divided by 24. KVM 1 is $6.49/mo on that term and renews at $11.99/mo. KVM 2 is $8.99 then $14.99. KVM 4 is $12.99 then $28.99. Month-to-month list prices on the same page are $19.49 / $24.49 / $42.99. If you only remember the headline, you will be surprised in year three.
  • Hetzner Cloud publishes hourly rates with a monthly cap, in euros and dollars, excluding VAT. The 15 June 2026 adjustment is the current list. CX23 is $6.49/mo (€5.49) in Germany/Finland. CX33 is $9.99. CX43 is $18.49. Those caps do not include IPv4. Primary IPv4 is $0.60/mo (€0.50) on Hetzner’s IP price list. IPv6 is free. We add IPv4 when we say “effective.”
  • DigitalOcean Basic Droplets are the same list price in every region on the Droplet pricing page: $6 / $12 / $24 / $48 for 1 / 2 / 4 / 8 GiB Regular CPU. Per-second billing with a monthly cap. Simple, and you pay for that simplicity.
  • Vultr Cloud Compute (Regular) is hourly with a 672-hour cap in Vultr’s billing docs. The official pricing HTML is behind a Cloudflare bot check from this build environment. We still include rows we could corroborate: 2 GB at $10 (55 GB disk, 2 TB transfer) and 4 GB at $20 (80 GB, 3 TB) from vultr.com/pricing snippets, plus 1 GB at $4.96 and 8 GB at $40 from an aggregator updated 15 August 2026 (vc2-1c-1gb and vc2-4c-8gb). Disk and transfer are omitted on those two aggregator-only rows rather than invented.

Hetzner’s Cost-Optimized page listed CX/CAX sizes as “not available” in some locations when we fetched it. The price list still exists. Availability is a separate question from list price — check the console before you plan a launch around a CX23 in a specific city.

Four boxes, three RAM bands

Always-on agents cluster into three sizes. The calculator on the homepage is the same model in UI form.

4 GB — one API worker, maybe a browser if you are careful

Hostinger KVM 1: 1 vCPU, 4 GB, 50 GB NVMe, 4 TB, $6.49 intro / $11.99 renew. Hetzner CX23: 2 vCPU, 4 GB, 40 GB NVMe, 20 TB EU traffic, $7.09 effective with IPv4. Vultr 4 GB: 2 vCPU, 80 GB, 3 TB, $20. DigitalOcean 4 GiB: 2 vCPU, 80 GB, 4 TB, $24.

If you will keep the machine for two years and you like a control panel, Hostinger’s prepaid 4 GB is the cash-out-the-door winner, with the honest caveat that you are buying 1 vCPU and a renewal cliff. If you want 2 vCPU, hourly billing, and a 20 TB pipe in the EU, CX23 is the better computer for almost the same monthly cap. DigitalOcean and Vultr at 4 GB are for people who already live in those consoles or need a US metro Hetzner does not cover with CX.

8 GB — the default always-on agent host

This is the “~$9/mo” band the kit page talks about, not a guarantee.

Hostinger KVM 2: 2 vCPU, 8 GB, 100 GB NVMe, 8 TB, $8.99 intro / $14.99 renew. Hetzner CX33: 4 vCPU, 8 GB, 80 GB, 20 TB, $10.59 effective. Vultr 8 GB: 4 vCPU, $40 (disk/transfer not confirmed here). DigitalOcean 8 GiB: 4 vCPU, 160 GB, 5 TB, $48.

On a 24-month Hostinger invoice, KVM 2 is extremely cheap RAM. On a CPU-per-dollar basis, CX33 is the adult pick: twice the vCPU of KVM 2, no prepaid trap, destroy-it-tonight billing. US-only teams who refuse EU data residency will not get CX pricing; they will look at DigitalOcean, Vultr, or Hetzner’s US CPX line, which is a different (much more expensive) catalog after the June 2026 adjustment.

16 GB — local models, or too many browsers

Hostinger KVM 4: 4 vCPU, 16 GB, 200 GB, 16 TB, $12.99 intro / $28.99 renew. Hetzner CX43: 8 vCPU, 16 GB, 160 GB, 20 TB, $19.09 effective. We did not add a DigitalOcean 16 GiB Basic row ($96 on the same official table) because it is off the “cheap VPS” brief unless you already standardized on Droplets.

KVM 4’s intro rate is the most aggressive 16 GB number in the sheet. It is also the ugliest renewal (more than 2×). If you are testing a local 7B and might delete the VM in six weeks, Hetzner hourly is the rational contract. If you know you will keep 16 GB for two years and you will actually take backups, prepaid KVM 4 can win on cash — just write the $28.99 number on a sticky note.

What the spreadsheet does not capture

Support and the panel. Hostinger sells a friendlier dashboard and weekly backups in the plan copy we fetched. Hetzner sells a console, an API, and the assumption you can read a man page. DigitalOcean’s docs are the reason people still pay $24 for 4 GB. Vultr is the other hourly American console. None of that shows up as a column of dollars, and it is a real preference.

Traffic. Agent workloads are usually chatty in small packets, not video. Hostinger’s 4–16 TB and Hetzner’s 20 TB EU inclusion are both “you will not think about this.” DigitalOcean’s 1–5 TB on Basic is still fine. If you scrape the public web with a headless browser all day, read the overage policy before you congratulate yourself on a $6 box.

Backups. Hostinger’s VPS page lists free weekly backups. DigitalOcean lists backups as 20% (weekly) or 30% (daily) of Droplet cost, or a usage-based plan. Hetzner backups are an add-on priced as a fraction of the instance; we did not put a number in the table because we did not fetch a confirmed current percentage on 26 August. Budget extra, or copy dumps off-box yourself. A snapshot on the same hypervisor is a convenience, not a disaster plan.

CPU quality. “2 vCPU” on cost-optimized hardware is not “2 vCPU” on a dedicated-CPU SKU. Hetzner’s CPX/CCX lines exist for a reason and, after June 2026, they cost like it. For an agent that spends most of its time waiting on an API, shared CX/KVM is enough. For a local model, steal RAM first, then consider a dedicated-CPU SKU if tokens/sec are actually the bottleneck.

A sane default

If you are hosting one API-driven agent with Redis and a reverse proxy: buy 4 GB. Prefer Hetzner CX23 if EU and hourly are acceptable; prefer Hostinger KVM 1 if you want a prepaid invoice and a panel. If you add a real browser or a second worker, go to 8 GB (KVM 2 or CX33) before you add a second VM. Keep the model weights off this machine until 16 GB is already in the budget.

Do not put production secrets only on the VM. Do not skip a restore drill. Do not trust a 24-month “from $6.49” banner without reading the renewal line.

The Always-On Agent Host Kit is the $29 write-up of that default: spec picker, a generic compose file, and the backup checklist. The VM is still yours to rent. Polar checkout for the kit is not live on this build.

Sources