Published: 24 September 2026
If you get exactly one server and your users are somewhere in continental Europe, put it in Frankfurt. That is the least interesting advice in European hosting and it is still correct. This post is about why, what it costs on our grid, and the specific cases where one of our other four countries beats it.
What a VPS costs in Frankfurt
Germany carries our top location premium alongside Austria — €1.50 a month on the smallest plan, €20.00 on the largest, over the Romanian base:
| Plan | RAM | vCPU | SSD | Per hour | Per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VPS I KVM | 2 GB | 1 | 20 GB | €0.0077 | €5.50 |
| VPS II KVM | 4 GB | 2 | 40 GB | €0.0125 | €9.00 |
| VPS III KVM | 8 GB | 2 | 60 GB | €0.0222 | €16.00 |
| VPS IV KVM | 16 GB | 4 | 80 GB | €0.0361 | €26.00 |
| VPS V KVM | 24 GB | 6 | 100 GB | €0.0611 | €44.00 |
| VPS VI KVM | 32 GB | 8 | 120 GB | €0.1084 | €78.00 |
Euro, before VAT, no setup fee. Frankfurt and Vienna are priced identically; Amsterdam and Warsaw sit €0.50 to €4.00 under, and Bucharest €1.50 to €20.00 under. The full grid is in our location pricing post.
The 10 Gbps streaming plans run from €12.99 a month for 2 GB to €161.99 for 32 GB with 12 vCPU — the same premium as Amsterdam, Warsaw and Vienna.
Why Frankfurt is the safe default
DE-CIX is the largest internet exchange in the world by aggregate peak traffic, and the great majority of German domestic traffic plus a large share of pan-European traffic passes through this metro. That has two consequences you can feel.
The first is reach. From the figures on our Frankfurt location page: Amsterdam 8–10 ms, Vienna 10–12 ms, London 12–15 ms, Paris 12–15 ms, Warsaw 20–25 ms, Ashburn 85–95 ms. Nothing in continental Europe is far.
The second is that eastern carriers backhaul here anyway. A Warsaw or Bucharest ISP frequently reaches the wider internet through Frankfurt, so a Frankfurt origin is rarely badly placed for eastern users even though a local origin would be better.
Where the default costs you
"Rarely badly placed" is not "best placed", and the gap is bigger than people assume:
- Polish users. The penalty from Frankfurt to Polish consumer ISPs is real and measurable — enough that any Polish-majority workload belongs in Warsaw, which also costs €0.50 to €4.00 a month less.
- Romanian, Bulgarian, Moldovan and Greek users. Warsaw is 30–35 ms from Bucharest and Frankfurt is 32–37 ms; a local origin in Bucharest removes that entirely and is our cheapest location.
- Austrian, Czech, Slovak and Hungarian users. Vienna is priced the same as Frankfurt and closer to all of them.
- British and Scandinavian users. Amsterdam is 7–9 ms from LINX against Frankfurt's 12–15 ms, and costs less.
Put plainly: Frankfurt is the right answer when you do not know where your users are, or when they are genuinely spread out. It is the wrong answer when you do know and they are concentrated somewhere else. Our guide to choosing a datacentre location works through the reasoning properly.
What you actually get
A full KVM virtual machine with its own kernel and real root — not a container sharing a host kernel, which is what "VPS" sometimes quietly means. Dedicated RAM and vCPU rather than a share of a pool; our noisy-neighbour post covers why that distinction shows up in your latency graphs, and the KVM explainer covers the mechanism.
From the panel: power control, an in-browser console that works when networking does not, reinstall, and a root password reset. Twenty-six install images on the order form — Debian 10 to 13, Ubuntu 18.04 to 26.04 LTS, Rocky and AlmaLinux 8 and 9, CentOS Stream 9 and 10, Fedora, openSUSE Leap, Oracle Linux 9, Arch, and FreeBSD 14.1, 14.2 and 15.0. Traffic is unmetered on every plan.
Hourly or monthly
Every Frankfurt plan is available by the hour at the monthly price divided by 720, charged against prepaid account credit once per clock hour at the top of the hour in UTC. A 16 GB VPS IV is €0.0361 an hour, so an eight-hour benchmark is €0.29 and a week of parallel running during a migration is €6.06.
One thing to be explicit about: a powered-off VPS still bills. It continues to hold its RAM allocation, its disk and its IP address on a node. Destroying it is what stops the meter. If the machine is permanent, move it to the monthly, quarterly or annual cycle instead — the annual price is 10% below twelve months at the base rate, and we worked through where the crossover sits in when hourly beats monthly.
Order in Frankfurt
Choose a size on the hourly VPS page or the streaming VPS page, then pick Germany from the location list. The price updates as you do, in your own currency, before you confirm anything.