Leaseweb is raising its VPS prices starting August 1, but the increase doesn’t land the same way across the board. The cheapest US plan is jumping from $3.50 to $6.99 a month, nearly doubling, while the premium tiers barely move, and in some markets the mid-range plans aren’t changing at all.
Averaged across the board, that reads as a modest 20% increase. In practice, it’s much more targeted than that. The gradient shows up consistently across every region Leaseweb operates in. In the US, the average sits at 41%, but the entry plan alone jumps 99.7% while the top tier rises just 11%. The UK sees a 24% average increase driven almost entirely by a 47% hike on its entry plan. The Netherlands, Germany, and Canada average 16%, with the middle tiers left untouched in the Dutch and German lineups. Japan’s increase is a modest 7%, limited to its entry plan, while Singapore and Australia see no changes at all.
Leaseweb points to rising costs, mainly a memory shortage that has roughly doubled RAM prices industry-wide, as the reason behind the hike. That explains why prices are climbing, but not why the increase takes this particular shape. Memory costs scale with server size, meaning a bigger VPS with more RAM should, in theory, see a proportionally similar or even larger cost increase than a smaller one. Instead, the cheapest plans are taking the biggest hit by far. IPv4 address scarcity, the other cost Leaseweb cites, actually falls more evenly per instance regardless of plan size, and IPv4 pricing has been trending down rather than up as more address blocks hit the market. Neither factor fully explains the gap.
What this looks like, then, is less a cost-driven adjustment and more a pricing correction. The cheapest plans have always carried the thinnest margins, making them the easiest place to claw back revenue when costs rise elsewhere.
The people who feel this most are the ones who picked the $3.50 plan specifically because it was $3.50. Resellers, small agencies, and side projects running on budget VPS instances don’t have a larger account relationship with Leaseweb cushioning the blow the way an enterprise customer running dedicated servers might. Existing contracts auto-renew at current pricing for now, but that protection only lasts until the next renewal cycle.
Leaseweb isn’t acting alone here either. OVHcloud, Netcup, and Scaleway have already raised prices this year citing the same memory shortage, while providers like Contabo have held steady or even cut prices. What Leaseweb’s announcement makes clear is just how unevenly this shortage hits different tiers, and the near-free VPS tier that years of competition created is quietly disappearing.
