Cost of Goods
Budget VPS plans — The cheapest server you can hand a client and still sleep
A small server is cheap to buy and expensive to own, and the gap between those two facts is where agencies quietly lose money on their most technical clients.
Straight answer first
The entry KVM shelf is $13.52 a month for 1 core, 1 GB of RAM and 25 GB of SSD — cheap enough to sell to almost any client, and the reason to hesitate is that the management you take on with it is worth several times the box.
This page is about that gap. What a small server realistically holds, what it costs to own rather than to buy, the three jobs it is genuinely the right answer for, and the pricing structure that stops a cheap box becoming an unpaid retainer.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 24 August 2026
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Disks on the hosting shelves
Resellers reach for a small VPS for two reasons: a client needs something a shared package cannot do, or a workload has no website attached to it at all — a bot, a scheduled job, a small internal tool. The first is a proper escalation. The second is often the better business, because nobody expects a background process to have a support desk.
The shelves: 1 Core Unmanaged VPS at $13.52/mo with 1 GB and 25 GB; 2 Core at $20.28/mo with 2 GB and 50 GB; 4 Core at $33.81/mo with 4 GB and 75 GB. All KVM with full root, 24 Linux and BSD builds available, DDoS filtering in front, free setup, and a choice of London or Dallas.
What a small box honestly holds
A 1 GB machine at $13.52/mo runs one thing properly. A small LEMP stack with a modest site, or a Node service with a small database, or a VPN, or a scheduled job that talks to an API. Two of those if both are light. Swap will cover a momentary spike; it will not cover a workload, and a database that gets OOM-killed at midnight is the classic way this shelf disappoints somebody.
The 2 Core at $20.28/mo with 2 GB and 50 GB is the more honest starting point for anything a client will notice going down. The seven-dollar difference is invisible next to one evening of your time spent diagnosing memory pressure, and it is the recommendation most agencies should default to.
Above that, 4 Core at $33.81/mo with 4 GB and 75 GB is where a real application with a database, a cache and a worker process starts being comfortable. Size on the memory profile of the stack rather than on the client's revenue — an underspecified box is a support commitment, not a saving.
The cost of owning it, not buying it
Unmanaged means root access with nothing fenced off, and it means everything that a hosting account did automatically now belongs to somebody on your side. Security patches. Firewall rules. Certificate issue and renewal. Backups — snapshot backups are yours to switch on, and the emphasis is on yours. A panel, if the client wants one; cPanel can be added at the counter.
Price that honestly. An hour a month of routine maintenance at any professional rate exceeds the box by a wide margin, and that is before anything goes wrong. The mistake agencies make is quoting the server and absorbing the management, because the server has a number on a page and the management does not.
The other line to check before you sell is the refund position: VPS and dedicated servers are provisioned to order the moment payment clears, so they sit outside the money-back window that covers shared, business, WordPress and WooCommerce hosting at 30 days and reseller hosting at 7. Do not promise a client a trial on a box you cannot return.
The three jobs it is genuinely right for
Background work with no audience. A scheduled scraper, a queue worker, an integration that moves data between two of the client's systems at four in the morning. Nobody watches it, nobody expects a dashboard, and a small unmanaged box is exactly the right shape and price.
A staging or build environment for your own agency. A cheap machine that runs your CI, holds test copies and gives you somewhere to reproduce a client's problem is one of the better twenty dollars an agency spends, and it has no client-facing support obligation at all.
A client requirement that shared genuinely cannot meet — a service on its own port, an unusual runtime, root for their own developer. This is the legitimate escalation, and it is the one where you must reprice, because the machine now has an audience and an expectation attached to it.
Pricing so a cheap box is not an unpaid retainer
Two invoice lines, always. The server, with your margin on it, and the management, priced on response time and patching cadence rather than on specification. If the client sees only one number they will benchmark it against a server they found online, and you will lose an argument about a product you were not actually selling.
Write the exclusions before you provision: the client's own application code, anything their developer changes, and any third-party service running on the box. Without that list, one Sunday spent debugging somebody else's deployment wipes out a year of margin on a $13.52 line.
And keep the option of not doing it. For most client problems, a shared shelf upgrade is cheaper for them and dramatically cheaper for you — Pro at $4.66/mo and Elite at $7.08/mo carry a great deal more than people assume. Recommending the upgrade first makes you an adviser; reaching for a server first makes you a sysadmin with a billing problem.
Cheap to buy, deliberate to own
Free setup and monthly billing mean a small box can be provisioned for an experiment and cancelled without ceremony, which makes it a genuinely useful tool for an agency rather than a commitment.
Root access, KVM virtualisation, 24 Linux and BSD builds and console access from the panel mean the machine is properly yours — which is the point, and also the whole of the responsibility.
- Full root on KVM, nothing fenced off
- 24 Linux and BSD builds on the shelf
- Free setup, billed monthly
- London or Dallas, chosen at order
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
$13.52 for a real machine
The 1 Core shelf gives a genuine KVM server with full root, which is cheap enough to use for agency infrastructure as well as client work.
Free setup, cancel anytime
Monthly billing with nothing to pay before you start makes a small box a usable experiment rather than a commitment.
Console and rebuild from the panel
Reboot, rebuild and console access mean a machine you have broken is recoverable without a ticket.
DDoS filtering included
1 Tbps+ filtering in front and a 20 Gbps uplink on every hypervisor, on the cheapest shelf as well as the dearest.
Add cPanel if the client wants it
A panel is available at the counter, so a client who expects one is not a reason to avoid a server altogether.
A shared shelf to recommend instead
Pro at $4.66/mo and Elite at $7.08/mo cover far more than most people assume, which is often the better advice and the cheaper one for you.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Size on the memory profile, not the revenue
A stack that needs 2 GB belongs on the 2 Core shelf at $20.28/mo; an underspecified box is a support commitment rather than a saving.
- 2
Quote two lines from the outset
The server with your margin, and the management priced on patching cadence and response time — never one blended number.
- 3
Write the exclusions before provisioning
Client application code, developer changes and third-party services on the box, listed in writing before the machine exists.
- 4
Offer the shared upgrade first
Most requests for a server are answered better by a bigger shelf, and recommending that first is what makes the eventual server sale credible.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- Memory profile of the stack established before choosing a shelf
- Server and management quoted as separate invoice lines
- A written exclusion list agreed before provisioning
- Patching cadence decided and diarised
- Snapshot backups switched on and a restore tested
- Firewall rules documented rather than remembered
- Certificate issue and renewal mechanism verified
- Location chosen on where the client's users actually are
- The no-refund position on VPS understood before you promise a trial
- A build document started on the day the machine is created
Across the Counter
Things people ask us all the time
Is the 1 GB shelf ever the right thing to sell a client?
For background work, yes — a scheduled job, a small integration, a bot with no audience. For anything a client will notice going down, the 2 Core shelf at $20.28/mo with 2 GB is the honest starting point. The seven-dollar difference is trivial against one evening spent diagnosing memory pressure, and the failure mode on a 1 GB box under load is a database process being killed at an hour when nobody is looking.
Should I use a cheap VPS for my own agency rather than for clients?
It is one of the better uses for it. A build machine, a staging box, or somewhere to reproduce a client's problem costs about twenty dollars a month, carries no support obligation, and pays for itself the first time it stops you testing something on a live client site. Free setup and monthly billing mean it can exist for a project and be cancelled afterwards.
What does DDoS filtering on the cheap shelf actually cover?
1 Tbps+ filtering sits in front of every hypervisor, with a 20 Gbps uplink, and it is not tiered by plan — the smallest server has the same protection as the largest. That matters commercially because it lets you say yes to a client with a nervous risk profile without qualifying the answer or pricing a separate product.
Can I hand a client the login to a server I manage?
You can, and you should think hard first. Root with nothing fenced off means anything they change is genuinely changed, and the next incident becomes a question of who did what. If their developer needs access, agree in writing that changes they make are outside your management scope, and keep a build document current so 'what did it used to be' has an answer.
How do I bill a machine whose workload keeps changing?
Bill the management flat and the server at cost plus margin, then review the shelf quarterly. Moving between VPS sizes is a provisioning change rather than an argument, and the shelves are close enough together — $13.52, $20.28, $33.81 — that a step up is easy to justify. What you should not do is absorb the growth silently, because that is how a $13.52 line ends up carrying an hour a week of your time.
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Buy the box, price the management.
KVM servers from $13.52/mo with free setup, full root and DDoS filtering — with the reseller plan carrying everything that does not need one.
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