Price per TB of Server Storage in 2026: 999 Plans, SSD and HDD Ranked Separately

The typical VPS among the 45 hosts we track charges $279 a month per terabyte of SSD. Contabo's Storage VPS 30 charges $12.88. Hetzner's SX65, a dedicated server with four 16 TB hard drives, works out to $1.51. That is a 185x spread for the same unit, measured on one night: HostingSift's price snapshot of 3 November 2026, 999 plans.

Most of that spread comes from how disk is packaged. A few hosts sell disk as the product. Most sell it as a side effect of RAM, so you pay for a terabyte by buying a machine you didn't need. The cheapest terabytes per class are below, with what happens to them at renewal. One result runs against the usual NVMe advice: the market median makes NVMe look cheaper than SATA SSD, while the hosts that sell both charge more for it.

How the 999 plans were counted

The index covers every VPS, cloud and dedicated plan that 45 hosts in the HostingSift catalog listed as orderable on 3 November 2026: 999 plans with a parseable disk size. Price per TB is the monthly price divided by raw disk capacity in terabytes, converted to US dollars at 1.15 per euro.

"Raw" matters. A server with four 1.92 TB drives has 7.68 TB raw, but if you mirror the drives so one failure doesn't lose data (RAID 1, or RAID 10 across four disks), you can store only half of that. Every price per TB in this article is per raw terabyte unless a sentence says otherwise. VPS disks are already redundant on the host's side, so for them raw and usable are close, minus the operating system.

What stayed out:

• Plans the host marked unavailable on that night, and usage-billed platforms (Railway, Fly.io) where disk has no fixed monthly price.
• Plans with no disk type stated (Cloudways, FastComet and four InMotion rows, 42 in total). They count toward the 999 but not toward the SSD or HDD rankings.
• Managed platforms (Cloudways, DevRims, Diploi, SiteGround) are out of the VPS median. Their 95 plans run from $461 to over $240,000 per TB, because you are buying management with a small disk attached.
• OVHcloud dedicated servers and its Kimsufi line are out of every ranking: the disk configuration we hold for them does not match the base configuration the price belongs to.

Disk type is the strongest one named in the plan: NVMe, then SATA SSD, then HDD. A plan with both an SSD and a hard drive counts as "mixed" and sits with the HDD plans, because the hard drives carry nearly all the capacity. Prices for Contabo, Hetzner and Time4VPS exclude VAT; netcup's include it, so netcup looks about 19% dearer here than its net price. US hosts are pre-tax.

The cheapest terabyte of SSD on a VPS

On 3 November 2026, the cheapest SSD terabyte on any VPS among the 45 hosts HostingSift tracks was Contabo's Storage VPS 30: 1 TB SSD for €11.20 a month on a 24-month term, which is $12.88 per TB. Contabo holds the first five places. The median across 629 SSD and NVMe VPS plans from 37 hosts was $279 per TB.

Three prices matter for each plan. The sign-up price is what the first term costs. The no-commitment price is the month-to-month rate with no contract. The renewal price is what the host says you pay after the first term ends. Hosts that never publish a renewal price get "not published", because a missing number isn't the same as no increase.

Source: HostingSift nightly price snapshot, 3 November 2026. IONOS terms checked on ionos.com the same day. "n/a" means the host lists no month-to-month price for that plan.

Contabo's lead is real, but read the plan names. A Storage VPS is a normal VPS with a bigger, slower disk and fewer CPU cores per gigabyte than Contabo's Cloud VPS line. For a file server, a backup target or a media library, that trade is exactly right. For a busy database it isn't.

Three caveats on the rest of the list. IONOS shows $20 for XXL+ "for 3 months with a 1-year term", then $68, so the sign-up price covers a quarter of the contract. Servarica's Fat Slice prices more than doubled this autumn: Fat Slice 4 went from $14.67 to $20.17 a month on 19 August 2026 and to $31.17 on 12 September, and has held there since. Time4VPS's Container plans run on OpenVZ, a container technology where Docker isn't guaranteed to work, and their sign-up prices dropped 20% on 31 October 2026 while the renewal price stayed put. Four nights of data is too few to call that anything but a promotion.

Why a bigger VPS doesn't buy cheaper disk

VPS plans with 1 TB or more of SSD had a median of $416 per TB on 3 November 2026, against $261 for plans under 50 GB, across 629 plans from 37 hosts in HostingSift's catalog. Disk barely gets cheaper as plans grow, because most hosts size disk to RAM: the median plan carries 16.7 GB of disk per GB of memory.

Look at who sells the big disks. Of the 79 VPS plans with at least 1 TB, 58 come from Vultr, Linode, AWS and DigitalOcean. Those clouds sell a terabyte only inside an instance with 64 GB or more of RAM, so the disk inherits the price of the memory. The VPS price per GB of RAM index shows what that memory costs.

Source: HostingSift nightly price snapshot, 3 November 2026, SSD and NVMe VPS and cloud plans only, sign-up prices.

DigitalOcean is the clearest case. Its Droplets give about 10 GB of disk per GB of RAM, and its cheapest terabyte is a 1 GB Premium Intel Droplet with 35 GiB for $8, or $213 per TB. Every other Droplet costs more per TB, up to $416 on the 5 TB ones. Hetzner's cloud line, at $373, sits closer to Vultr than to Contabo. If you're comparing the two developer clouds directly, the DigitalOcean vs Vultr comparison covers more than disk.

The practical rule: on a general-purpose cloud, never upsize an instance to get disk. Every one of these clouds sells block storage volumes separately, and a volume is almost always cheaper than the RAM you'd be dragging along.

NVMe costs more inside a host, less across the market

Across all 629 SSD and NVMe VPS plans on 3 November 2026, the median NVMe terabyte cost $267 and the median SATA SSD terabyte $300. Inside each of the four hosts that sell both, NVMe was the dearer one: Contabo, Vultr, netcup and Private Hosting all charge more per NVMe terabyte. The market-wide median misleads because the cheapest hosts sell only NVMe.

NVMe drives connect straight to the server's PCIe bus and handle several times more reads and writes per second than SATA SSDs, which go through an older disk interface. That speed costs money, and hosts that offer the choice charge for it.

Source: HostingSift nightly price snapshot, 3 November 2026.

Contabo makes the cleanest test, because one plan offers both. Cloud VPS 6 at €6.00 a month gives you a choice of 200 GB SATA SSD or 100 GB NVMe for the same price, so the NVMe terabyte costs exactly twice as much. The other three gaps are less clean. Vultr's NVMe plans also come with newer CPUs, Contabo's other NVMe plans are its Cloud VPS Plus and VDS lines, and netcup's gap comes from its root servers: its VPS 8000 sells 1 TB of NVMe on ARM for the same $77.18 as 1 TB of SATA SSD on x86. So NVMe is never the discount at these four hosts, but it is not always a premium either.

So why is NVMe cheaper in the pooled median? IONOS, NameHero, Hostinger and Servarica sell nothing but NVMe, and all four have host medians under $90 per TB. Meanwhile AWS, Linode and Hostwinds hold 104 of the 180 SATA SSD plans, and they are expensive for reasons that have nothing to do with the drive. Pool them and NVMe looks like the discount option. If your workload is a file archive, take the SATA option when a host offers it and keep the difference.

Dedicated servers: cheaper per terabyte than a VPS

Dedicated servers with SSD or NVMe had a median of $106 per raw TB on 3 November 2026, across 167 plans from 17 hosts in HostingSift's catalog, against $279 for VPS plans. The cheapest was Namecheap's Dual AMD EPYC 7313 with four 1.92 TB NVMe drives at $170.24 a month on a yearly term: $22.17 per raw TB.

Source: HostingSift nightly price snapshot, 3 November 2026. OVHcloud dedicated excluded, see the method section.

Two things to adjust before you compare these with a VPS. First, mirror the disks and the price doubles: the Namecheap EPYC in RAID 10 stores 3.84 TB, which is $44.33 per usable TB at the sign-up price. Second, the sign-up price is a one-year deal. Namecheap lists $283.74 a month at renewal for that server, or $36.94 per raw TB. That's still a cheap terabyte of NVMe, but it's not $22.

The other catch is size. The two cheapest dedicated terabytes come attached to dual-socket servers with 32 cores and 128 GB to 768 GB of RAM. If you need 2 TB of fast disk and nothing else, a $170 server is the wrong shape however good its price per TB looks. More dedicated plans are in the dedicated hosting category.

Hard drives are cheap only in bulk

The cheapest terabyte in the whole index on 3 November 2026 was Hetzner's SX65 dedicated server: four 16 TB SATA hard drives for €84 a month excluding VAT, billed monthly with no contract, which is $1.51 per raw TB. Hetzner's price list confirmed the €84 the same day, plus a €39 one-time setup fee. Across 40 HDD plans from six hosts, the median was $36 per TB.

Source: HostingSift nightly price snapshot, 3 November 2026; Hetzner SX65 price and setup fee checked on hetzner.com the same day.

Look at the bottom two rows. A dedicated server with a single 1 TB hard drive costs $47 to $72 per TB, more than every one of the top 15 SSD VPS plans above. Hard drives only win when you buy dozens of terabytes at once, because what you're paying for is the server, and the disk count is what spreads that cost.

For the SX65, the realistic usable figure is 32 TB in RAID 10 or 48 TB in RAID 5, so $3.02 or $2.01 per usable TB. The setup fee adds about six cents per TB a month over the first year. Even with both adjustments, nothing else in our data comes close at that size. The SX line also has a history quirk: on 11 September 2026 our tracker logged €274 for one night because Hetzner's availability feed served a bigger configuration. That was not a price change. €84 is what we recorded on every other night since we started tracking the line on 30 July.

Time4VPS is the cheap way into hard drives at small sizes. Storage 2 TB is €5.29 a month on a 24-month term, but that's the 20% cut that appeared on 31 October 2026; it was €6.61 for the 124 nights before, or $3.71 per TB. After the first term it renews at €13.22, which is $7.42 per TB, and month-to-month it's $10.66. Every Storage plan has one vCPU and runs on OpenVZ, so treat it as a backup target, not an application server.

What the renewal and no-commitment price do to the ranking

Seven of the 15 cheapest SSD VPS plans on 3 November 2026 had a published renewal price more than 1.3x their sign-up price, per HostingSift's snapshot. On the renewal price, IONOS's $28 to $33 per TB becomes $94 to $104, Time4VPS's $32 becomes $81 and NameHero's $40 becomes $120. Contabo's no-commitment price of $16.10 per TB still beats every other host's sign-up price.

Source: HostingSift nightly price snapshot, 3 November 2026. IONOS year-one average = 3 promo months plus 9 months at the regular rate, per the terms on ionos.com that day.

IONOS loses its place fastest, inside the first contract year. The 3-month promotion means the average month of year one costs nearly three times the advertised rate, and from month four the XXL+ is a $94-per-TB plan, a third of the median but seven times Contabo. The Time4VPS and NameHero numbers hold for two and three years respectively, which is a long time to sit at a good price, but plan for the jump.

Contabo, Servarica and Hetzner don't publish a separate renewal price at all. Our records show one price for each of their plans, so we can't tell you month 25 from our data alone. Hosts that do publish one are listed in which hosts publish renewal prices.

Stability is the reassuring part. Of the 629 SSD VPS plans in the index, 416 have shown one single price on every night we've recorded them. Contabo's Storage VPS 30, 40 and 50 have sat at €11.20, €20.00 and €29.60 every night since we started tracking them on 17 March 2026.

Which disk I'd rent for which job

For a backup target or an archive under 3 TB, Time4VPS Storage or Contabo's Storage VPS line, as of November 2026. Above roughly 20 TB, a Hetzner SX65 at $1.51 per raw TB. For fast disk next to an application, a host's own NVMe plan sized for the RAM you need, plus a separate volume for bulk files.

• Offsite backups, 1 to 3 TB. Time4VPS Storage 1 TB or 2 TB if you can commit for two years and accept one vCPU. If you want a normal VPS that can also run software, Contabo Storage VPS 30: 1 TB SSD, 18 GB of RAM and six cores for €11.20 on 24 months, or €14.00 month to month ($16.10).
• A file server or Nextcloud for a team, 300 GB to 1.4 TB. Contabo's Storage VPS range again; nothing else in the top 15 matches it at both sign-up and no-commitment prices. Servarica's Fat Slice 4 is the NVMe alternative at $34 per TB month to month, after this autumn's increases.
• A database or anything that hammers the disk. Buy for CPU and RAM first, on NVMe, and ignore price per TB. The VPS prices by spec article is the better guide for that choice.
• 10 TB and up. A dedicated server. Under about 20 TB, a mixed SSD-and-HDD box like Namecheap's 2 x 6 TB at $47.41 a month (yearly, $74.07 at renewal) or Servarica's Baboon at $89. Past that, the SX65, and the SX135 once you outgrow 64 TB.

The one thing I wouldn't do is buy a bigger instance on a big cloud to get more disk. At DigitalOcean's median of $992 per TB, a terabyte bought that way costs 77 times the Contabo plan; a separate volume or a storage VPS is far cheaper. More options are in the VPS hosting category.

Originally published at hostingsift.com.