It started with a monitoring screenshot someone shared: 8 threads, 64GB RAM, 4TB disk, Singapore location, unmetered traffic. I had a bunch of always-on services—more than a dozen containers and gateways besides Claude Code—that I was looking to move somewhere, so I wanted to know: what’s the lowest price for this kind of setup? I ended up going through several OVH product lines. This article is the condensed version, with the numbers and the pitfalls below.

First, identify the server: it’s a Kimsufi KS-GAME

The machine in the screenshot matches OVH’s budget Kimsufi line, specifically the KS-GAME Singapore location: i7-7700K, 4 cores / 8 threads, 64GB RAM, 1×4TB HDD, 300Mbps unmetered traffic, S$42.99/month, or about ¥234/month after Singapore’s 9% GST.

There’s one key thing to understand: Kimsufi sells refurbished old hardware in a circular-economy model. The i7-7700K is a consumer CPU from 2017. It’s cheap not because OVH is doing charity, but because the hardware is retired stock brought back into service. Once you understand that, a lot of the “why is this so cheap?” questions answer themselves.

Three fake low prices to rule out first

During the research, I ran into at least three traps that looked cheaper at first glance but weren’t actually the case:

“Regional arbitrage” is an illusion. The Singapore site lists S$42.99, while the global site shows $32.10. That looks like a 30% gap, but S$42.99 ÷ 1.35 ≈ $31.8—it’s just the exchange rate. OVH’s global pricing is unified by USD equivalent. There is no “order from a certain country’s site to get it cheaper” trick.

The widely circulated “SYS-1 for only $33” is an outdated price. The current real price for the Singapore location is S$79.99/month, and it only comes with 16GB RAM, nowhere near the 64GB tier.

The VPS line doesn’t have this spec. Some people call this kind of configuration a VPS, but a 64GB + 4TB setup only exists in the bare-metal dedicated server line. It doesn’t match OVH’s VPS products.

Actual buyable options: three tiers

The pattern is clear: each step up doubles the RAM and adds about forty to fifty yuan. KS-4 is “the cheapest OVH dedicated server you can buy right now,” but its European datacenter has high latency to China, and storage tops out at 2×2TB, so it’s more of a price anchor than a practical fit.

My final choice: KS-1-B, not KS-GAME

Before mapping that 64GB + 4TB screenshot configuration onto my own needs, I audited my actual workload: 16 always-on services, peak memory usage around 6–8GB, and roughly 50GB of disk usage. In other words, the setup in the screenshot was eight times more than I needed.

KS-1-B’s 32GB lands right in the comfort zone: peak usage takes 8GB, leaving another 24GB for database cache and future growth, with a feel similar to my local 32GB physical machine. After setting up Soft RAID on the 2×500GB disks, the usable capacity is 500GB—ten times my data size. The 500Mbps bandwidth is also faster than KS-GAME’s 300Mbps. Tax included, it’s ¥178/month.

For me, KS-GAME’s 64GB + 4TB would just be paying for idle capacity. Of course, if your workload really does need 64GB, KS-GAME is cheap among 64GB dedicated servers—Hetzner is more expensive in the same tier.

If you’re actually ordering, there are three real ways to save money

After ruling out the fake low prices, the real savings come from these three things:

Setup-fee promotions. OVH dedicated servers usually charge a one-time setup fee in the first month, often roughly the same as the monthly rent. KS-5, for example, has a setup fee of S$26.69. During promotional periods, this fee is waived, meaning you only pay the monthly fee for the first month. When I was researching, this promotion covered KS-GAME, Rise-1/3, Rise-GAME, and SYS-GAME, and was valid until 2026-08-31. The promotion list and dates can change, so check the official site before ordering.

Tax. Singapore has 9% GST, while Europe is around 20% VAT. For the same hardware, the tax-inclusive price differs by about ten percentage points. That’s a real regional difference—much more real than any “exchange-rate arbitrage.”

Datacenter location. For the same model, European locations are about 20% cheaper than Singapore ones (KS-4 Europe at ¥135 vs. the Singapore version at about ¥178). The discount is the price you pay in latency. Whether your service is aimed at users in China or overseas is something you’ll need to weigh yourself.

Conclusion

To recreate the configuration in that screenshot: KS-GAME Singapore, about ¥234/month including tax, and ordering during a setup-fee waiver promotion gives you the cheapest first month. For my own workload: KS-1-B at ¥178/month; the doubled RAM on KS-GAME would simply be waste. The logic of this OVH price range boils down to one sentence: buy the next tier above your workload, not the specs from someone else’s screenshot.