Who BuyVM is, and why the low-end crowd keeps buying

BuyVM has been selling KVM slices since 2010. It grew out of the FranTech crowd, is now formally a division of Cloudzy (the site footer says so), and has spent fifteen years selling roughly one product: virtual servers with unmetered bandwidth. Three datacenters carry the whole lineup, Las Vegas, Piscataway in New Jersey, and Roost in Luxembourg. The control panel is an in-house build called Stallion. On LowEndTalk the brand is a fixture, half cult following, half "when does Luxembourg stock come back."

Every number in this review was read off buyvm.net on November 6, 2026. BuyVM prices tend to sit still for years and then shuffle without a press release, so the date is part of the data. Where a figure comes from someone other than BuyVM itself, the text says so.

The current lineup, straight from the order pages

The slice menu is short, which is honestly refreshing after scrolling a hyperscaler's forty-row pricing grid. Four core slices:

  • SLICE 512 - 1 core (fair share), 512 MB RAM, 10 GB SSD, unmetered transfer, 1 IPv4 - $24.00 per year
  • SLICE 1024 - 1 core, 1 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD - $3.50 per month
  • SLICE 2048 - 1 core, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD - $7.00 per month
  • SLICE 4096 - 1 core with dedicated allocation, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD - $15.00 per month

The homepage banner claims "starting at $2.00 per month." That is the $24/year 512 MB slice converted into a monthly figure. Marketing arithmetic, but honest marketing arithmetic.

Higher tiers are sold as high-volume plans and scale in clean steps, all on 1 Gbps unmetered ports:

  • 2 cores / 8 GB RAM / 160 GB SSD - $30.00 per month
  • 4 cores / 16 GB RAM / 320 GB SSD - $60.00 per month
  • 6 cores / 24 GB RAM / 480 GB SSD - $90.00 per month

Every plan runs cores clocked at 3.50 GHz or better, ships with one IPv4 address, and now bundles a DirectAdmin license at no extra cost. DirectAdmin wants at least 1 GB of RAM to behave, so think of it as a perk from the SLICE 1024 up. There is also a separate Storage VPS line, 250 GB at $7/month up to 2 TB at $60/month, aimed at people who want big cheap disks without buying a slice plus slabs.

Unmetered bandwidth is the actual product

Every slice ships with unmetered transfer on a 1 Gbps port. Not "3 TB then overage billing," not "unmetered until we notice." That single word is what separates BuyVM from basically everyone else at this price.

For scale: BuyVM's own comparison page pegs Vultr's 4 GB cloud instance at $20/month with 4 TB of transfer included, and DigitalOcean and Linode sit in the same neighborhood. Push 8 TB out of any of those and the invoice learns new tricks. Push 8 TB out of a $3.50 BuyVM slice and nothing happens.

The catch is the acceptable use policy. Unmetered means the company will not bill overages, not that anything goes. The network is friendly to game servers, media, backups and mirrors, and unfriendly to anything that smells like abuse. The other practical catch: unmetered is not dedicated. You share the pipe with your neighbors, and the small slices are fair-share CPU too.

DDoS filtering for the price of a coffee

A filtered IPv4 address costs $3.00 per month per IP, layer 4 through 7, covering SYN floods, spoofed packets, UDP and reflection junk. On anycast addresses it is $5.00 per month per IP. The marketing pages throw around "3500 Gbps+" of mitigation capacity while the features page says 500+ Gbps and 700 million packets per second, so take the big number as aspiration. The point is not the exact terabit figure, it is that a cheap always-on filtered IP is genuinely rare.

For contrast, BuyVM's comparison footnote prices AWS DDoS protection at $10 per month per IP capped at 10 Gbps, and most budget hosts offer nothing at all. If you run a game server, a Tor relay, or any service that attracts teenage entropy, $3/month is cheaper than a week of outage.

Filtered IP at $3/month, unmetered pipe, DDoS-bait workload: this combination is the whole reason BuyVM exists in 2026.

Block Storage Slabs: five dollars per terabyte

This is the part that sounds like a typo until you read it twice. Block storage is sold in 256 GB chunks at $1.25 per month. That works out to $5.00 per TB per month, or $50 for 10 TB, attached over an InfiniBand RDMA fabric with NVMe cache layers in front of it.

  • Maximum slab size is 10 TB, and up to 8 slabs can hang off one slice
  • A slab can be detached and reattached to another slice in the same facility, live, without a reboot
  • You must own a KVM slice in the same datacenter; slabs are an add-on, not a standalone product
  • Available in Las Vegas, New York, Miami and Luxembourg

BuyVM's own comparison table lists OVH block storage at $90 per TB per month, Vultr at $100, and AWS EBS at $131.50. Those are the vendor's numbers, not ours, so haircut them as you like. Even halved, $5/TB is playing a different sport. Run the media-server math: a $7 SLICE 2048 plus a 1 TB slab is a 1 TB box with unmetered bandwidth for $12 a month. Object storage like Backblaze B2 beats it on raw cost per gigabyte, but B2 is not a mountable disk you can point Plex at.

Anycast for free, with an asterisk

BuyVM lets customers announce an anycast IP across all three locations at no charge. The asterisk is that you need a VPS in every location and a routing config (the wiki walks through it), so the real cost is three slices plus an afternoon. For a self-rolled mini-CDN, authoritative DNS, or a game proxy that follows the sun, this is a rare toy at this price. Elsewhere anycast is an enterprise line item.

Where BuyVM loses

No vendor is a monoculture of wins, and the weaknesses here are structural rather than cosmetic:

  • CPU on cheap tiers is fair share. Only SLICE 4096 and above get dedicated cores. A $3.50 slice parked next to a compile farm is a known genre of complaint.
  • Three locations, zero in Asia-Pacific. Serving users in Singapore or Sydney from Las Vegas or Luxembourg means physics taxes you every request.
  • No hourly billing, no cloud-style orchestration. Provisioning happens from a billing panel. Stallion is a good panel, but there is no Terraform provider story worth the name.
  • Stock droughts are a feature of the ecosystem. Popular tiers in popular cities sell out and stay sold out for weeks. An unavailable order button is normal weather, not a bug.
  • 10 GB of disk on the entry slice is one apt upgrade away from full. The 512 MB box is a network toy, not a workstation.

BuyVM against RackNerd and Hetzner

RackNerd, the default answer for "cheapest KVM," runs year-round specials that public trackers put at $21.99/year for 1 GB, $35.99/year for 2 GB and $59.99/year for 4 GB. Against those numbers BuyVM looks expensive: the cheapest 1 GB slice is $42 annualized. What RackNerd gives you in price, it takes back in metered transfer, roughly 2 to 7 TB depending on tier, and DDoS filtering is simply not on the menu. BuyVM's pitch is the opposite trade: pay more per gigabyte of RAM, never think about the traffic graph.

Hetzner remains the European benchmark for price-to-performance, with entry x86 cloud servers in the low single-digit euros and generous included transfer. But the traffic is metered rather than unmetered, US capacity is billed as premium, and filtered IPs are not a $3 checkbox. If your workload is CPU-bound in Europe, Hetzner wins. If it is bandwidth-bound in North America, it does not.

Quick shorthand:

  • Media server, game server, backup target, anything with a scary traffic graph: BuyVM
  • Cheapest always-on Linux box, price above all: RackNerd annual special
  • CPU-heavy builds with European users: Hetzner

Who should actually buy this

  • Self-hosters running Plex, Jellyfin or audiobook servers who keep denting storage VPS quotas
  • Game server admins who need the traffic headroom and the $3 filtered IP more than they need CPU bursts
  • Anyone building a small anycast DNS or CDN experiment and wanting three PoPs for under $20/month total
  • Backup and mirror operators whose monthly transfer would cost more elsewhere than the server itself

And who should not: teams wanting hourly billing, autoscaling groups and an API-first workflow; anyone whose users are mostly in Asia; and anyone who needs consistent dedicated CPU on a sub-$10 budget. Those are different products from different companies.

Bottom line

BuyVM is a fifteen-year-old answer to a narrow question: what if bandwidth and DDoS abuse were effectively free and everything else was merely fine? The 2026 pricing keeps that answer intact. A $24/year unmetered slice, $3 filtered IPs and $5/TB block storage are three of the most aggressive numbers in the industry, verified live on the order pages this week. You pay for them with fair-share CPU on small tiers, three datacenters and no cloud pretensions. For the traffic-heavy self-hoster, that trade is a bargain. For the autoscaling crowd, it is simply not their tool.