Pick when you want unmetered 1Gbps + cheap bulk storage for self-hosted Plex/Jellyfin, IRC bouncers, mail relays (after port 25 unblock), or privacy-first projects out of Luxembourg. Avoid for production traffic that needs always-available stock, a real money-back window, or formal SLA credits.
Plans
Verified against BuyVM's pricing pages.
| Plan | vCPU | RAM | Storage | Transfer | Monthly | Hourly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KVM Slice 512MB | 1 | 0.50 GB | 10 GB NVMe | — | $2.00 | — |
| KVM Slice 1GB | 1 | 1 GB | 20 GB NVMe | — | $3.50 | — |
| KVM Slice 2GB | 1 | 2 GB | 40 GB NVMe | — | $7.00 | — |
| KVM Slice 4GB | 2 | 4 GB | 80 GB NVMe | — | $15.00 | — |
| KVM Slice 8GB | 2 | 8 GB | 160 GB NVMe | — | $30.00 | — |
| KVM Slice 16GB | 4 | 16 GB | 320 GB NVMe | — | $60.00 | — |
| KVM Slice 32GB | 8 | 32 GB | 640 GB NVMe | — | $120.00 | — |
SMTP port 25 (outbound mail)
Deal-breaker for self-hosted mail & transactional email.
On request Blocked, unblocked on request Read more
BuyVM hard-drops outbound traffic on ports 25, 465, 587, and 2525 by default — applied stateless on the network edge. Unblock is available on request via Billing/Sales ticket; community reports show successful unblocks resolved in under 5 minutes for established accounts, but BuyVM has historically been cautious and may decline new accounts with no payment history. If you're running mail-from-VPS or transactional email, plan to ticket immediately after provisioning, or route everything via SendGrid/Postmark/Mailgun on port 587 with auth.
Verified Apr 27, 2026 · source
Capabilities & infrastructure
Known pitfalls
What the marketing pages don't tell you.
Stock is chronically scarce — set a notifier before counting on availability
BuyVM's KVM Slices and Block Storage Slabs frequently show 'Out of Stock' across all four DCs, with restocks happening in unpredictable batches (community-tracked at buyvmstock.com and via Discord notifier bots). If you wait until launch day to buy capacity, you may not be able to. The recommended workflow is: subscribe to a stock notifier first, buy when available, then plan your migration.
3-day refund window only — and only on PayPal/credit-card payments
Unlike most competitors with 7/14/30-day money-back, BuyVM allows refunds only within 3 days of the initial order, exclusively on PayPal or credit card. Crypto and Alipay are non-refundable. Cancellation after 3 days converts unused time to account credit that can never be cashed out. Test thoroughly inside 72 hours or treat the prepay as fully committed.
Outbound mail ports are hard-blocked by default — must ticket to unblock
Ports 25, 465, 587, and 2525 are stateless-dropped on the network edge. Unblocks are usually granted via a Billing/Sales ticket once your account is in good standing, and community reports show same-day turnaround in many cases — but new accounts with no payment history occasionally have requests declined. If you are deploying a mail server (Mail-in-a-Box, Mailcow, Postfix relay), file the unblock ticket immediately and don't deploy to production until you have written confirmation.
DDoS protection is paid per IP, not bundled — unprotected IPs see only upstream filtering
Despite a 3.5Tbps+ Voxility/Path.net upstream, the protection only routes through that filter for IPs you explicitly purchase at $3/mo each. Unprotected IPs are subject to upstream-only mitigation, which means a targeted application-layer attack can take down a $2 slice. Budget the $3/mo protection upgrade if you run anything attack-attractive (game servers, IRC, controversial speech).
Sporadic multi-hour outages with delayed ticket response — not single-region production
Long-tenured customers (5-8 years) report stable service overall, but recent LowEndTalk threads (late 2025 / early 2026) document multi-hour outages with status-page lag and 24+ hour ticket silence on edge-case issues. The Miami DC had a 12-hour bandwidth-degraded incident, and a December 2025 LV slice-unreachable thread is still open. Use BuyVM for hobby, dev/staging, storage, and self-hosting; mirror customer-facing production to a managed peer with formal SLA credits.
Trust score breakdown
Scored across six dimensions — an editorial estimate, not a guarantee.
Why 65/100
Stallion control panel covers the basics (start/stop/reboot, VNC, reinstall, snapshots, IPv6/Anycast/rDNS, real-time resource graphs) and ships with 100+ OS templates plus blogging/cPanel/OpenVPN/file-share quick installs. Workflow assumes some Linux comfort — there is no managed marketplace, no guided onboarding, no integrated DNS/firewall UI. Free DirectAdmin license materially lowers the barrier for traditional shared-hosting refugees. Acceptable for hobbyists; not the right fit for first-time VPS users.
Why 72/100
Ryzen 3900X + 100% NVMe + unmetered 1Gbps ports + 40Gbit InfiniBand fabric for slab storage is a strong hardware story for the price tier. VPSBenchmarks and YABS runs are consistently competitive against same-priced budget peers. The Luxembourg DC has documented peak-time bandwidth contention; US locations stay clean. Bimodal node experience (some slices land on contended hosts) keeps this short of a top-tier score.
Why 65/100
BuyVM advertises 99.9% uptime with no formal SLA credit framework. Long-tenured users (5-8 year customers) report multi-year stretches with minimal downtime, but recent (2025-2026) LowEndTalk threads document multi-hour outages with delayed ticket responses, and the Luxembourg location has had documented bandwidth-saturation episodes at peak. Production-critical traffic should not run single-region on BuyVM; multi-region failover or pairing with a managed provider is the community's standard guidance.
Why 70/100
Best-case support is excellent — sub-5-minute ticket replies, founder/staff engaging on Discord and LowEndTalk, port-25 unblock requests handled smoothly. Worst-case support is a documented blind spot: customer reports of 24+ hour ticket silence on server-unreachable issues and snapshot failures, with status-page/reality mismatches. No live chat, no phone. Slightly above the budget-VPS median because of the active community presence, but not in the same tier as RackNerd's chat-led model.
Why 70/100
Pricing pages, ToS, AUP, and wiki are all clear and stable; the 3-day refund window and per-payment-method refund eligibility are documented up front (rare in budget tier). Counterweights are the chronic out-of-stock cycles (which the company doesn't communicate proactively) and incident communication (status page sometimes stale during real outages). Stronger than Contabo, weaker than DigitalOcean/Hetzner.
Why 88/100
$2/mo for 512MB / 1 vCPU @ 3.9GHz / 10GB NVMe / unmetered 1Gbps with free DirectAdmin and free Windows licenses is a top-tier offer. The Block Storage Slabs at $1.25/256GB (up to 10TB) over InfiniBand RDMA is a unique pricing primitive — no major cloud or budget peer offers anything comparable for storage-heavy workloads. The 3-day-only refund window and DDoS-as-paid-add-on are the value drags.
Operating systems & apps
Control panel: Stallion (custom in-house, SolusVM API-compatible); free DirectAdmin license bundled per slice · full root access
Operating systems
One-click apps
Datacenter locations
4 regions worldwide.
Support
Response time: Median ticket reply 15-30 minutes for unmanaged issues; sub-5-minute responses common during US business hours; escalations on holidays / overnight can stretch to several hours
Verified Apr 27, 2026
Community pulse
BuyVM has one of the strongest tribal communities in the LowEndTalk/budget-VPS world — Trustpilot ~925 reviews trending positive, Discord/IRC actively staffed by Frantech personnel, and recurring multi-year customer reviews who quote BuyVM as the platonic ideal of value-density hosting (free DirectAdmin + free Windows + Block Storage Slabs at $1.25/256GB). The signature praise points are the storage pricing primitive, unmetered 1Gbps, the privacy-friendly Luxembourg DC, and Francisco Dias / staff personally engaging on community channels. The recurring drag points are chronic out-of-stock cycles, the 3-day refund window, periodic Luxembourg bandwidth congestion, and a small but visible cluster of 'ticket went unanswered for 24+ hours during outage' complaints in 2025-2026. The community recommendation is consistent: use BuyVM for self-hosted Plex/Jellyfin (Slabs), IRC bouncers, mail relays (after port-25 unblock), VPNs, dev/staging, and privacy-conscious hosting — and pair with a managed peer for customer-facing production traffic that needs formal SLA credits.
Sentiment verified Apr 27, 2026
Recent changes
How BuyVM compares
Top-rated alternatives on the board.
UpCloud
€3 / $3.50 /mo
25 on req
Linode (Akamai Cloud)
$5/mo
25 on req
Hetzner Cloud
€3.79/mo
25 on req
DigitalOcean
$4/mo
25 blocked