The question is almost always asked as a shopping question — which VPS, which provider, which datacentre. It is really an arithmetic question, and the arithmetic has one dominant term: whether the disk under your library spins or not.
A terabyte of NVMe on a general-purpose VPS costs somewhere between €90 and €200 a month. A terabyte of spinning disk on a seedbox costs between €2 and €5. That is not a 20% difference you can optimise away with a better provider or a promo code. It is a factor of thirty, and it decides the answer before any other spec matters.
We priced this on 28 August 2026, from the order pages of the VPS hosts people actually use for this, and against the 71 seedbox plans across 9 providers we track. Here is the whole calculation.
What a terabyte costs on a VPS
Euros per month, excluding VAT, disk as advertised.
Two things stand out. First, the range is narrow and high: ninety to two hundred euros per terabyte across every mainstream host. Second, Contabo is an order of magnitude out of line with the rest — because it is the only one of these selling a product designed around capacity rather than compute.
The OVHcloud figures are the promotional "from" rates on a commitment. The company's announced monthly rate for VPS-1 after its April 2026 increase is €6.49, which puts that plan at €162 per TB rather than €95. Read the renewal price, not the acquisition price.
What a terabyte costs on a seedbox
We maintain pricing on 71 plans across 9 seedbox providers. Split by what the data actually sits on:
The cleanest proof is inside a single vendor. Whatbox sells both media from the same catalogue, on the same day:
Same company, same network, same support desk. Flash costs eight to eleven times what rust costs, and Whatbox prices it at a flat €29.47 per TB from the smallest plan to the largest — no volume discount, because there is no volume discount to be had on the component.
Now put the two tables side by side. The cheapest flash you can buy from a seedbox host, €14.20 per TB, undercuts every plan in the VPS table except Contabo's storage line — and it is six and a half times cheaper than the best NVMe rate among the general-purpose hosts. Those hosts are not selling you storage; they are selling you compute with a boot disk attached, and charging boot-disk rates for every gigabyte after the first.
So the real question is which medium, not which VPS
If your library is under about 200 GB, none of this matters and any VPS will do. Above that, there are four honest builds. All figures 28 August 2026, euros per month excluding VAT.
Each of these breaks somewhere, and the break is the whole story.
Local NVMe on a cloud VPS breaks on price per terabyte and nothing else. It is fast, it is yours, and it is the most expensive terabyte in the table by a factor of thirty-five.
The Contabo Storage VPS is the only mainstream VPS built for this shape of workload, and at €11 to €21 per TB it is genuinely the cheapest VPS terabyte you can rent. It breaks on three things: the ceiling is 1.4 TB, the port on the cheaper tiers is 200 to 600 Mbit/s rather than a gigabit, and the headline prices are 24-month introductory rates. Check what month 25 costs before you commit a library to it.
A cloud server with a Storage Box mounted is the cheapest terabyte in the table at €2.63 — and the most misleading line in it. A Storage Box is network storage reached over SMB, WebDAV or SFTP, capped at 10 concurrent connections. A torrent client writing hundreds of pieces from dozens of peers is exactly the access pattern that cap exists to prevent. As a place to archive a finished library it is excellent and very cheap. As the working directory of an active client it will disappoint you, and no amount of tuning changes the connection limit.
A dedicated server from the auction is the build that genuinely competes. Spinning disk, a real 1 Gbit/s port, unlimited traffic, root on the metal. We pulled the live auction feed on 28 August 2026: 168 machines, entry price €59, median €81.50, and the best storage value in the pool a 12 × 16 TB box at €404 — €2.05 per raw TB. Note raw: if you mirror, halve it. It is also the only option here where the pre-2026 hardware price still applies, because Hetzner explicitly excluded the auction from its June 2026 increase.
The second bill: bandwidth
Seedbox hosts sell port speed. VPS hosts sell traffic volume. These are different products and the specification sheets do not line up.
- Hetzner cloud publishes no port speed at all on its cost-optimised or regular-performance pages — the columns are vCPU, RAM, disk and price. What it does publish is 20 TB of included traffic in the EU and €1 per additional TB.
- OVHcloud publishes bandwidth and not much else: 500 Mbps on VPS-1 rising to 3 Gbps on VPS-4, traffic unlimited.
- Contabo publishes 200 Mbit/s on the entry Storage VPS rising to 1 Gbit/s at the top, outgoing traffic "unlimited — fair usage policy applies based on average server workloads", with an explicit right to throttle.
- Whatbox publishes a shared 40 Gbit/s connection on HDD plans with 10 to 40 TB of monthly upload included and unlimited download.
For context on how cheap European egress is: in Hetzner's own comparison data, an extra terabyte costs €1.00 on its cloud and €77 on AWS. If you have been budgeting seedbox bandwidth using hyperscaler intuitions, recalibrate.
The practical consequence: on a VPS you will hit the traffic allowance before you fill the disk, and on a seedbox you will fill the disk before you hit the upload cap. Size for whichever runs out first.
The part no spec sheet shows
Both routes are legal ways to run a torrent client. They differ in who handles the complaint.
A mainstream European VPS provider holds you liable for your content and acts on notices quickly. Hetzner's terms prohibit publishing content that infringes third-party rights including copyright, and its abuse team reserves the right to lock the IP address through which the content is reachable until you remove it or respond. That process is designed for a webmaster with an inbox, not for someone whose machine seeds continuously. One notice on a weekend is a locked IP until Monday.
Managed seedbox hosts in the Netherlands are built around a different operating assumption, and most of them are explicit about which trackers they will and will not accommodate. That is a real difference in service, and it is the reason the price gap is not purely about hardware.
If you go the VPS route, read the acceptable-use policy before the spec sheet, and read our notes on privacy and security considerations before you point anything at a public tracker.
What we would actually pick
If it has to be a VPS: Contabo Storage VPS 30 — 1 TB for €11.20, six vCPU, 18 GB of RAM and a 600 Mbit/s port. It is the only mainstream VPS where a terabyte costs single digits. Take the 1 Gbit/s tier at €29.60 if you intend to seed rather than archive, and budget for the post-promotional price.
If you want the VPS experience with real capacity: a Hetzner auction machine with two spinning disks, from €59. Root on bare metal, a dedicated gigabit, unlimited traffic, and hardware still priced before the 2026 memory shock. This is the build that makes the "self-hosted seedbox" idea work.
If you only want the terabytes: a managed seedbox. €14 buys 3.9 TB on a 40 Gbit/s shared port with the torrent client, Plex and the Sonarr/Radarr stack already installed. Getting to the same place on a VPS costs more and takes a weekend. Our cheapest seedbox breakdown prices the entry tier of every provider we track, and the provider comparison has the full plan tables.
If you are still deciding what you are building: start with seedbox versus VPS, which covers what each is actually provisioned to do, and seedboxes versus cloud storage if the goal is archival rather than seeding.
The arithmetic to run before you pay
Take the size of the library you want to hold in two years. Multiply by the € per TB of the route you are considering. Add the monthly traffic you expect to push, priced at that host's overage rate. Compare that to €14 or €59 a month.
For almost every library above one terabyte, the VPS loses on cost, and it loses by a lot. The cases where it still wins are specific and real: you need root for something a seedbox will not run, you need a machine in a country no seedbox host serves, you already pay for the VPS and the library is small, or you want the hardware to be dedicated and priced before June 2026 — which points at the auction, not at a cloud instance.
Everything else is paying NVMe rates to store files that will be read once.
All prices read from the providers' own order pages on 28 August 2026, in euros per month excluding VAT and, for Hetzner cloud, excluding the €0.50 IPv4 address. Non-euro prices converted at the same reference rates used across this site (€1 = $1.1555 = £0.8557). Seedbox medians are computed across the 71 plans and 9 providers we track. Hetzner auction figures come from the live auction feed on the same date; disk totals are raw, before RAID.
The pricing environment behind these numbers moved twice this year — see the 2026 hosting price increase, line by line for what changed and what did not.
Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you sign up through them we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. It never changes which providers we recommend or how we rank them.
