Storage VPS in 2026: What a Terabyte Really Costs
Verified late-2026 prices for Hetzner Storage Box, Contabo and Time4VPS storage VPS, plus the IOPS throttling and renewal traps to check before buying.
Storage VPS is its own category in 2026
Nobody buys a storage VPS for the CPU. You buy one because you have terabytes of photos, a Nextcloud instance that outgrew the SSD, or an offsite backup job that needs a real target on the other side of the world. And 2026 turned out to be a strange year to need disk: RAM prices spiked, several budget cloud lines got repriced or simply went out of stock, and the cheap compute VPS everyone recommended in spring is not always orderable in autumn.
Storage lines mostly dodged that. Hetzner's cheap CX cloud servers spent much of September showing "not available" on the order page, but its Storage Box product kept its pricing. Contabo's storage tier still leads on raw gigabytes per euro. Time4VPS runs storage promotions that look almost like a pricing error until you read the renewal column. This guide walks through what a terabyte honestly costs right now, where the traps are, and which shape of storage fits which job.
Three ways to buy a terabyte
Protocol boxes: storage without a server
Hetzner Storage Box is the best-known example. You do not get root, an OS, or the ability to run software. You get SFTP, FTPS, SCP, rsync over SSH, Samba, WebDAV, and first-class support for BorgBackup, Restic, and Rclone. For a backup target that is often all you need, and the price reflects the smaller feature set: the entry BX11 carries 1 TB with unlimited traffic, ten concurrent connections, sub-accounts, and snapshots. Plans scale to 20 TB on the BX41, with Germany or Finland as the storage location.
Storage VPS: a root server built around disk
Contabo and Time4VPS sell actual servers with fat disks attached. Contabo's Storage line tops out at 1.4 TB on the Storage 50 plan with 50 GB RAM and a 1 Gbit port. Time4VPS goes the other way: its 1 TB plan pairs the disk with a single vCPU and 2 GB RAM, and scales up to 8 TB. These run full Linux, so you can host Nextcloud, Syncthing, a media server, or whatever else you want. Check the virtualization before buying: Time4VPS uses OpenVZ containers, not KVM, which matters if you plan to run Docker or custom kernels.
Block storage: pay per gigabyte
Hetzner sells Volumes at roughly €0.05 per GB per month, Vultr block storage sits around €0.10, and BuyVM sells 256 GB slabs at $1.25 each. This is the right shape when compute and storage need to scale separately, like a small NVMe instance with a big attached volume. For pure capacity it is usually the wrong shape. Rent a terabyte this way and the math stops being friendly fast.
What a terabyte actually costs, verified
Prices below were checked in late September 2026 against provider order pages and product pages. Treat anything you cannot reproduce on the vendor's own site as stale.
- Time4VPS Storage 1 TB — €4.17/month on a two-year term with promo code T4VPS70 (official order page). Renews at €8.35. Monthly billing costs €6.00 and renews at €11.99. 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 8 TB transfer, OpenVZ.
- Time4VPS 0.25 TB and 0.5 TB — €2.22 and €2.71/month on two-year terms, renewing at €4.45 and €5.42. 30-day money-back guarantee.
- Contabo Storage VPS 30 — around €14/month for 1 TB SSD, 6 vCPU, 18 GB RAM, 600 Mbit port. The line starts near €4.50 for 300 GB and tops out at 1.4 TB close to €37.
- Contabo Cloud VPS S — $6.99 for 200 GB SSD, 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, and a frankly absurd 32 TB of monthly transfer (raised from 20 TB during 2026). Not a storage line, but often the better buy if 200 GB is enough.
- Hetzner Storage Box BX11 — 1 TB with unlimited traffic from roughly €3.5/month, scaling through 5, 10, and 20 TB tiers. Protocol access only, no root.
- Hetzner Volumes — about €0.05/GB/month, so 1 TB of attached storage runs near €50/month. Great flexibility, poor value for bulk capacity.
Rule of thumb: if you only need a backup target, protocol boxes win on price. The moment you need to run software against the data, you need a storage VPS, and the cheapest terabyte with root access sits somewhere between €4 and €14 per month in late 2026.
The IOPS trap nobody puts on the order page
Spec sheets advertise burst numbers. Sustained numbers are what your workload lives with after the first ten minutes. One independent 72-hour fio test published in 2026 measured the gap directly, and it is wider than most buyers expect:
- Contabo Cloud VPS S (200 GB SSD) — 24,800 random-write IOPS in the first eight minutes, then a deliberate throttle down to a sustained 11,600. Sequential writes fell from 460 MB/s to 185 MB/s around the twelve-minute mark. The floor held steady for the remaining 71 hours.
- Hetzner local NVMe — 48,200 sustained IOPS with under 3% variation across the full 72 hours. No detected throttle.
- Hetzner Volume (attached) — 15,200 sustained IOPS, 320 MB/s sequential, with the extra 1.4 to 2.0 ms latency you would expect from network-attached storage.
- BuyVM block storage — about 4,800 sustained IOPS, HDD-class with an SSD cache in front.
Read-heavy workloads barely notice. A media server streaming video, an archive nobody touches, a sync endpoint with a handful of users: Contabo's sustained floor handles all of those. Sustained writes are a different story. Migrating a large database or running heavy ingest jobs on a burst-throttled disk will hurt, and no benchmark on a marketing page will warn you.
The renewal trap
Intro pricing in this market is aggressively temporary. Time4VPS doubles the price at renewal: the €4.17 terabyte becomes €8.35. Contabo's storage prices are introductory for 24 months, so the bill that lands in month 25 is the one to plan around. Neither practice is hidden, but both are easy to miss when the checkout page is shouting about a 64% discount.
Before committing a data library to any of these, ask two questions. What does month 25 cost? And how expensive is it to move terabytes out if the answer disappoints? Upload bandwidth from wherever your data lives is usually the bottleneck, which is exactly how these providers retain customers.
Matching the product to the job
- Offsite backup target — Hetzner Storage Box. BorgBackup, Restic, and Rclone support out of the box, unlimited traffic, snapshots, and the lowest cost per terabyte. You give up root and get a purpose-built tool.
- Personal cloud (Nextcloud, Syncthing) — Contabo Storage or Cloud line. File sync is bursty rather than sustained, which is precisely the pattern a burst-then-throttle disk handles well. 200 GB at $6.99 with 32 TB transfer covers a family's photos.
- Media server (Plex, Jellyfin) — Contabo Storage VPS 30 or Time4VPS 1 TB. Streaming is read-heavy, the IOPS floor does not matter, and 8 TB of monthly transfer goes further than you think.
- Cold archive — Time4VPS on a two-year term. €4.17/month for a terabyte nobody touches is hard to beat, and the 30-day money-back window gives you time to test real throughput.
- Database plus bulk storage — a small NVMe instance with an attached volume, or Hetzner local NVMe plus a Volume. Do not put a database on burst-throttled storage.
Read the redundancy fine print
Hetzner's own FAQ says Storage Box data sits on RAID arrays that can survive several drive failures, and then states plainly that the data is not mirrored onto other servers. That is honest, and it is also your problem. RAID protects against disk failure. It does not protect against the datacenter, the provider, or your own rm command going wrong.
Terabytes on a single budget product in a single location is not a backup strategy, it is a bet. Keep the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, two different media or providers, one offsite. If you are setting this up for backups specifically, the tooling side is covered in depth in our full backup and disaster recovery guide.
Bottom line
The cheapest real terabyte in late 2026 costs about €3.5 with no root (Hetzner Storage Box BX11), about €4 to €8 with root on a promotional term (Time4VPS), and about €14 with a fat server wrapped around it (Contabo Storage 30). Those are good numbers. Go in with both traps in view: sustained IOPS is roughly half the burst figure on the cheapest lines, and renewal pricing is frequently double the intro price. Pick by workload, verify the month-25 price before you upload anything, and keep a second copy somewhere else entirely.