RackNerd one-year VPS deals: KVM plans from $7.99 a year

RackNerd runs some of the cheapest KVM VPS deals in the market, and its one-year promotions are the sharpest of the lot: pay for twelve months up front and the first-year price drops to well under a euro a month. This page breaks down the current one-year tiers, what you actually get for the money, and how they stack up against the rest of our VPS deals table.

RackNerd one-year KVM plans

All three tiers run on Intel E5-2680 v4 cores with SSD storage and a 1 Gbps connection. Prices below are the latest ones we have on record for each product.

Plan	RAM	SSD	CPU	Bandwidth	First year	Renewal
KVM 1GB — 1 Year	1 GB	20 GB	1 core	2 TB	$7.99	$15.98/yr
KVM 2GB — 1 Year	2 GB	30 GB	1 core	4 TB	$11.99	$21.98/yr
KVM 4GB — 1 Year	4 GB	60 GB	2 cores	6 TB	$21.99	$32.98/yr

*Prices checked 6 October 2026. Renewal prices are per year.

Is the renewal price fair?

This is the part most RackNerd reviews gloss over. The headline price is the first year only; the renewal sits at roughly double. The KVM 1GB plan, for example, is $7.99 up front and $15.98 a year to renew. That is still cheap — mid-teens dollars for 1 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD and 2 TB of transfer is hard to beat — but you should budget for the renewal, not the teaser price.

One-year VPS deals generally follow this pattern. It is why we track both the first-year price and the renewal price separately in our database: the renewal is the number you will actually pay for most of the server's life.

How RackNerd compares for one-year VPS pricing

RackNerd is not the only provider selling annual KVM VPS plans near the bottom of the market. We currently track published VPS products from Hetzner, Contabo, Netcup, BuyVM, GreenCloud, CloudCone and OVHcloud, alongside RackNerd's three one-year tiers.

The honest picture, based on the numbers we hold:

• RackNerd wins on first-year price by a wide margin — nothing else we track comes close to $7.99 for a KVM instance with 1 GB RAM and 2 TB bandwidth.
• Hetzner and Netcup are stronger on long-term value: their list prices are higher up front but their renewal prices are far closer to the first-year price, and the hardware generations are newer.
• Contabo and BuyVM occupy the space between: more storage per pound than RackNerd at comparable renewals, with BuyVM's Las Vegas/Miami locations useful for US West Coast latency.
• CloudCone and GreenCloud run frequent promotions that occasionally undercut RackNerd on a first-year basis, but stock is usually limited and the discounts come and go.

If you know you will keep the server for a single year — a project, a trial workload, a temporary migration target — RackNerd's one-year pricing is the best value we track. If you expect to keep it running for three years or more, model the total cost including renewals before you commit; the providers with flatter renewal curves may work out cheaper.

What you get in the box

• Full KVM virtualisation: your own kernel, custom ISOs, no restrictions on modules
• SSD storage on all current one-year tiers
• 1 Gbps network port with generous monthly transfer (2–6 TB depending on tier)
• US locations on the 1GB tier; US and EU options on the 2GB and 4GB tiers

Verdict

For a first year of hosting, RackNerd's one-year KVM deals are among the cheapest we track, with the 1 GB plan at $7.99 as the entry point and the 4 GB plan at $21.99 as the sensible sweet spot. Just price your second year on the renewal figure, not the launch price — and check our full one-year VPS deals table before you buy, because promotional pricing elsewhere can occasionally close the gap.