Best VPS for Windmill (2026): Tested & Ranked

Last verified: 21 August 2026

Windmill turns scripts into webhooks, workflows, cron jobs and internal UIs - an open-source alternative to Retool and Temporal. Choosing a VPS for it works differently from most self-hosted apps, because capacity is measured in workers, and workers are bought with cores.

Why Core Count Decides This Comparison

Windmill does not get faster when you give one process more memory. It gets faster when you add worker containers, and the practical ceiling is roughly one standard worker per vCPU, at 1-2 GB of RAM each.

That inverts the usual advice. For most self-hosted apps you look for RAM first and treat cores as secondary. Here, a 4 vCPU plan runs about twice the concurrent job load of a 2 vCPU plan at the same memory-per-worker ratio, so the plan with more cores at the same price is simply the better machine.

Two other architectural facts shape the requirements:

• PostgreSQL is the queue. There is no Redis and no separate broker, so the database is on the hot path for every job dispatch and wants fast disk.
• Native workers are nearly free. They run lightweight jobs at about 0.1 CPU and 128 MB, which is why the stock stack ships one without needing another core.

Top VPS Choices for Hosting Windmill

Contabo Cloud VPS 4 - twice the workers for the same money

At 5.50 EUR net you get 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM and 100 GB SSD. Against Hetzner’s CX23 at one cent less, that is double the cores and double the memory, which translates almost directly into double the concurrent job capacity. For a workload made of many short jobs - scheduled syncs, webhook handlers, small ETL steps - this is the plan that does the most work per euro.

Contabo’s known weaknesses apply: slower provisioning and more variable network performance than Hetzner or DigitalOcean. Neither is on the critical path for a job runner that mostly talks to your own systems on a schedule.

Hetzner CX23 - fine for the default stack

CX23 gives 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM and 40 GB NVMe at 5.49 EUR net. That comfortably runs the stock compose stack - server, one standard worker, one native worker, indexer and Postgres - and the NVMe disk suits Postgres doing queue duty. The limit is parallelism: you are running about two workers, so a burst of simultaneous jobs queues rather than spreads. CX33 (4 vCPU, 8 GB, 80 GB NVMe) at 8.49 EUR fixes that, but costs more than Contabo’s equivalent.

DigitalOcean Basic 4 GB - the tooling premium

24 USD a month buys 2 vCPU, 4 GB and 80 GB SSD: the same specification as CX23 at roughly four times the price. What you get for it is the best snapshot workflow and documentation of the three, plus monitoring that works untouched. That is a reasonable trade if your team already lives on DigitalOcean and values one control panel. As a standalone choice for a job runner, the maths is hard to defend.

Matching the Plan to Your Workload

Deployment Notes

• Use the project’s own docker-compose.yml rather than writing one. Guides that add a Redis service are wrong: Windmill queues through PostgreSQL.
• Change the changeme Postgres password in the shipped .env before the first start, since the database is created on that boot.
• Set BASE_URL and point DNS at the server before starting, so Caddy can issue a certificate.
• Back up the Postgres dump and treat it as a secret - it holds the credentials your jobs use for everything else.

Final Thoughts

The ranking here follows from one architectural fact: Windmill buys throughput with cores. Contabo Cloud VPS 4 delivers about four workers for 5.50 EUR net, Hetzner CX23 about two for 5.49 EUR, and the US providers the same two for four times as much. Unless you need a specific region or already standardise on one platform, the core-per-euro figure is the whole comparison.

For an in-depth comparison of all available VPS options, visit our full VPS comparison.