Hostinger KVM 1 VPS

What you actually get for $6.49

KVM 1 is a virtual private server, which means it is a different product from everything else on this site rather than a larger version of it. For $6.49 a month on the 24-month term you get one AMD EPYC vCPU, 4 GB of RAM, 50 GB of NVMe storage and 4 TB of monthly transfer on a 1 Gbps port — with full root access and your choice of operating system.

The price is genuinely low for what is inside. Four gigabytes of RAM is more than Hostinger’s shared plans offer at a similar monthly rate. What you are not paying for is management. There is no hPanel controlling the server, no managed WordPress, no bundled mailboxes and no automatic SSL. You are renting a machine, not a website.

The 24-month term costs $155.76 upfront. Note that Hostinger uses a 24-month term for the best VPS price rather than the 48 months it uses for shared hosting, so the upfront commitment is smaller. The regular rate is $19.49/mo and renewal is $11.99/mo — a much gentler increase than the shared plans see.

Everything in the plan is hardware. There is no management layer, no control panel for the applications you run, and no support obligation beyond the infrastructure itself. That is the honest framing: $6.49 buys a machine and a network connection, and what you get out of it depends entirely on what you know how to do with it.

The resources, in plain English

• 1 vCPU on AMD EPYC — one dedicated core. Fine for a small API, a bot, a proxy or a lightly visited site. It is the limit you will hit first if you run anything CPU-bound, such as image processing or a build pipeline.
• 4 GB RAM — this is the reason to buy the plan. It is more memory than a shared hosting account gets, and it is yours alone. A Node.js app, a small Postgres database and a reverse proxy fit comfortably side by side.
• 50 GB NVMe — around 20,000–30,000 optimised images, or a healthy amount of application code, logs and Docker images. The NVMe interface keeps random reads fast, which matters for databases.
• 4 TB monthly transfer — on a 1 Gbps port. Four terabytes is roughly 4 million page views of a well-optimised page. Almost nobody on this tier comes close.
• I/O at 300 MB/s — disk throughput is capped but consistent, and it is noticeably higher than shared hosting’s 20,480 KB/s ceiling.
• Unlimited inodes — the file and directory limits that constrain shared hosting do not apply here. You are bounded by disk space instead.
• One IPv4 and one IPv6 address — a dedicated IPv4 is included, which is why the dedicatedIp field reads false on this page: the schema describes the shared-hosting dedicated-IP add-on, and on a VPS the address is simply part of the product.
• Free weekly backups — hardware-level snapshots, not an application-level backup service. Test a restore early so you know how it behaves.
• Firewall management, AI web terminal and a public API — you can manage firewall rules from the dashboard, run commands in a browser terminal and automate the server through Hostinger’s API.

What is missing matters as much as what is present. No CDN, no automatic SSL and no mailboxes. Each of those is something you install or buy separately.

Who this plan is right for

KVM 1 fits people who already think in terms of servers. A developer who wants a cheap box to run a side project, an API or a Discord bot. Someone who wants to self-host a VPN, a Git server, an uptime monitor or a small database. A technical founder who wants to learn server administration on real hardware without spending $20 a month.

It also fits a specific kind of small website: a static site or a lightly visited WordPress install that a competent administrator wants to run with exactly the stack they choose, rather than whatever a managed host provides.

Where this plan starts to hurt

The single vCPU is the first wall. Compiling a large project, transcoding video, running a heavy cron job — anything that pins the CPU — will make the whole server feel slow while it runs. If your workload is CPU-bound rather than memory-bound, KVM 2 and its two cores are the minimum.

The second wall is operational. Everything that is automatic on shared hosting is manual here. The OS needs patching. The firewall needs rules. Certificates need renewal. Backups need verifying. None of that is difficult, but all of it is your job, and skipping it is how servers get compromised.

The third is email. There is no mailbox allowance and no SMTP relay. Running your own mail server on a new VPS is possible but painful — deliverability depends on IP reputation you do not yet have. If you need business email, keep it on a hosted plan and point your DNS at this server for everything else.

Networking is worth a note too. The 1 Gbps port and 4 TB of transfer are generous, but the IP address you are issued is new and unproven. Reputation has to be earned, and a fresh server has none. That affects email most of all, but it also matters if you plan to call third-party APIs that rate-limit by IP.

Rule of thumb: if you cannot describe what you would do when SSH stops responding, you are not ready for an unmanaged VPS. Start on a managed plan and move up when you can answer that question.

How it compares to the plan below and above

Compared with Cloud Startup, the trade is control against convenience. Cloud Startup gives you managed WordPress, email, SSL and a CDN for a similar monthly price, but no root access and no dedicated resources. KVM 1 gives you root and isolation, but you build everything on top of it yourself.

Compared with KVM 2, the extra $2.50 a month buys a second core, twice the RAM, twice the storage and twice the transfer. It is the better value of the two and the plan most people should pick if they are choosing a VPS at all.

How to buy it without overpaying

1. Take the 24-month term for the $6.49 rate. $155.76 upfront is a modest commitment and the renewal jump to $11.99/mo is smaller than on shared hosting.
2. Choose your OS template carefully at checkout. Rebuilding later means wiping the server, so pick the distribution you actually intend to run.
3. Claim the free domain in year one and point its DNS at your server’s IP.
4. Install your own SSL. Certbot or Caddy will issue and renew Let’s Encrypt certificates automatically once configured.
5. Put a CDN in front of anything public. None is included, and a free tier from a third party will absorb most of your static traffic.
6. Test a backup restore in the first week. Weekly backups are only useful if you know how to bring one back. If you outgrow the weekly window, use our hosting cost calculator to check whether KVM 2 or an external backup service is cheaper.