VPS hosting is great for hosting experiments and websites that need to deal with a lot of traffic or consume a lot of resources. It’s great for stability and performance.
If you’re running a business, or need hosting for big projects online, then you need to know what the best VPS hosting is.
So in this review, I’ll describe the 5 best VPS hosting service around, with a run-down of their key features and pros and cons.
One thing common in all of the VPS providers is that they all have 24 7 customer service, offer root access & have reasonable money back guarantee.
While this list won’t be perfectly accurate for everyone—your own circumstance and preferences could change the order—it should be accurate in its order for most people.
So let’s get into it. First, a look at the best VPS hosting services I’m examining:
Bluehost is one of the most popular hosting providers around, competing with the likes of GoDaddy, for example.
As such a mainstream option, most of the attention goes to Bluehost’s shared hosting plans, but it’s VPS hosting options are no slouch.
In fact, they’re good for a similar reason Bluehost’s shared plans are enjoyed:
Bluehost is straightforward, affordable, and works well.
Its performance is a mixed bag: it’s on the slower side, but the uptime is usually very high.
Uptime is consistently good long term, with most months being 100% and the few that aren’t being above 99.95%. Over the last 8 months, uptime has been 99.965%.
However, the last few months, it’s dipped a bit.
And the response times from the last 8 months have been slower, around 870ms. Recently, they’ve been even slower.
Pros
Cons
GreenGeeks is a pretty unique entrant on this list:
As an overall hosting company, GreenGeeks is one of the best around, and it’s very eco-friendly. Overall, GreenGeeks has solid VPS hosting plans: they’re well-equipped and perform well.
However, they’re a bit pricey.
It’s worth noting that GreenGeeks, over the last 2 years of use, has been near-perfect. However, there was a rare outage that brought down the uptime for 2 days in March, which has skewed the average score.
Every day outside of those 2 days in March, for the last 8 months, has had 100% uptime.
Pros
Cons
As far as hosting companies go, DreamHost is one of the industry’s veterans. It’s been around since 1996, and has powered well over a MILLION websites.
DreamHost is particularly popular for its shared hosting plans and friendliness with WordPress. However, its VPS hosting plans are also pretty good.
The short version is that they’re affordable and well-featured…but do not perform that well.
DreamHost’s monthly uptime has often dipped below 99.9%, and the last few months has been closer to 99.6%.
That being said, it’s reliable enough that it’s a good option if you are prioritizing value.
Pros
Cons
GoDaddy is also an industry veteran—but it may just be the biggest name in consumer web hosting.
Like DreamHost, GoDaddy is known for its web hosting plans, but with a reputation for being affordable and also charging high renewal fees.
But it’s VPS plan is also worth its own look. They primarily offer a solid range of prices, including a very cheap first tier (they have one of the cheapest VPS plans) and solid performance.
GoDaddy has had consistently fast response times: in the last 8 months, the overall response time has averaged out at 450ms.
Additionally, overall GoDaddy has had great uptime, with 2018-2019 uptime being at 99.99% overall. Most months were either 100% or 99.99%.
The main drawbacks to GoDaddy VPS plan is the extra money GoDaddy tries to suck out of you.
Pros
Cons
Liquid Web is one of them more unique names on this list:
Liquid Web only does high-quality, managed hosting solutions. As such we’re ONLY looking at a managed VPS hosting here—keep that in mind.
Unsurprisingly, Liquid Web can be expensive—but in general its price range is within that of normal self-managed VPS hosting, meaning the prices are pretty good when you take into account that they’re managed solutions.
In terms of performance, Liquid Web has been consistently solid, with perfect or near-perfect uptime. In terms of response time, it’s good but not that exceptional.
Its flaws are relatively minor: Liquid Web is a very solid option. Read more about Liquid Web in general here.
Pros
Cons
While not among the most popular hosting providers in the world, Interserver has a large and dedicated following. When it comes to their VPS offering, Interserver’s customers are truly spoiled for choice.
First of all, Interserver offers 5 different types of VPS hosting. This includes WordPress, Windows, Linux, and Webuzo hosting as well as VPS storage.
The pricing between the different types of VPS hosting does differ slightly. Linux, WordPress, and storage hosting starts at $6/month. On the other hand, Windows hosting starts at $10/month. This is exceptionally low entry-level pricing.
What’s even better is that the VPS packages are highly flexible and scalable. You can’t individually adjust resources, but the maximum resources available are higher than most other VPS providers.
Interserver is typically highly praised for its uptime and performance. To back up their confidence, they offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee in their SLA.
Pros
Cons
Although VPS hosting (also referred to as just “VPS”) sounds scary, it’s actually fairly simple.
VPS stands for virtual private server.
A server, as you probably know, is basically a powerful computer that has the resources needed to support things online.
Choosing a type of hosting mostly means choosing how much of a server’s resources you want.
Although there are nuances, there are usually 3 basic options when it comes to picking hosting: shared web hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers.
Shared hosting is what it sounds like: a bunch of people pay a lower amount to share the resources of a server.
This means performance is a bit more limited, but it’s more efficient if your project is smaller in scope. And, it’s great for beginners.
You can read more about the best web hosting options here.
A dedicated server is the exact opposite: like the name sounds, you pay a premium price to get an entire server just for yourself.
It means top tier performance and storage, but also requires more technical knowledge.
Virtual private servers are the middle ground: servers are partitioned and you get your own dedicated ‘slice’ of a server, so to speak.
This means it has the best of both worlds: it’s more affordable than dedicated hosting because the server itself is being shared, but your part of the server is dedicated entirely to you, which you can’t get in shared hosting.
While it’s more advanced than shared hosting, it’s also less demanding of your knowledge than dedicated servers.
To use a common analogy: shared hosting is like renting a cheap apartment, dedicated hosting is like owning a house, and VPS hosting is like owning a large apartment or renting a small home.
You can read a more detailed explanation of VPS here.
With that cleared up, let’s start measuring up our competitors.
| RAM | CPU | Bandwidth | Space | Uptime | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bluehost | 2GB | 2 | 1TB | 30GB | 99.96% |
| GreenGeeks | 2GB | 4 | 10TB | 50GB | 98.97% |
| DreamHost | 1GB | – | Unlimited | 30GB | 100% |
| GoDaddy | 1GB | 1 | 1TB | Unlimited | 99.97% |
| Liquid Web | 2GB | 2 | 10TB | 40GB | – |
It should go without saying that the best VPS hosting isn’t something I can simply declare for you. Your specific circumstances are key.
However, there are some general points that everyone should consider:
First, performance—mostly uptime and response time.
For most people seeking VPS hosts, top-tier uptime and response times are a key point, one of the biggest draw-ins about VPS.
That should definitely be a priority for most of you: after all, VPS hosting DOES cost more than shared hosting, and part of that is because of the better uptime.
Another thing is the guarantee of resources. For most people, VPS hosting plans have a perfectly adequate range of resources, but it’s always good to be aware of what you need guaranteed.
Yet another key thing is scalability.
If your business grows, if you start getting a lot more traffic, will your provider let you upgrade without hassle, or for reasonable prices?
Most VPS hosts allow the ability to easily scale-up, as it’s one of the main appeals of this type of hosting. However, it may be worth investigating some of the cloud-based options here further if growth is on your horizon.
Customer Support is another key factor. VPS hosting is a naturally more complicated type of hosting.
That’s why a lot of platforms, including many of the options here, offer fully-managed or semi-managed (GreenGeeks) approaches.
Even if you are an expert and can do self-managed VPS, you want to make sure there are proper resources available. Luckily, all the options here do well in that regard.
Lastly, price still matters. Generally speaking, people purchasing VPS hosting plans are willing to invest money for a quality hosting product.
That said, they still would not want to pay for a dedicated server, and most would prefer to save money IF they can still guarantee quality.
So while VPS hosting can still be an investment, especially if you need a lot of storage, or the ability to scale, or manage VPS, be realistic about what it’s worth to you!
To sum up…these are the best VPS hosts!
Each one provides their own unique combination of power (resources and scalability), performance, price, and even ease of use.
It’s on you to determine what’s most important to you in a VPS companies.
If you’re an expert, you can probably afford to choose less expensive options that are still powerful and have lots of features, like GoDaddy.
If you need managed solutions that still retain power and can scale up quickly, Liquid Web is great.
And even our earlier options are solid: Bluehost’s VPS isn’t managed but has simple and straightforward interfaces, and GreenGeeks is overall powerful with an appeal to your conscience.
So the best VPS for you is on you—but it’s likely one of these providers.
And remember…most of these options have at least a 30-day money-back guarantee. So if you’re not sure, you can just try it yourself.
Happy hosting!
Frequently Asked Questions:
VPS guarantees large amounts of resources, so it costs a premium to reserve that amount.
If you’re running a business or online store, or have a high volume of traffic, VPS is great.
VPS is also good if you anticipate your site growing, as VPS is structurally scalable.
VPS is the virtual reservation of parts of a server: it’s like having slices of a server that are reserved solely for you.
It also allows more tinkering from the customer than shared hosting.
Additionally, as I’ve said, it’s very scalable if additional resources are needed quickly.
If you get the lowest-end VPS plan, without any augmentations, it could be slower than the highest shared hosting plan with tweaks.
But as even low-end VPS plans tend to be faster than expensive shared plans.
Additionally, many cloud hosting plans are pay-as-you-go, while many VPS plans are prepaid for a portion of time—though again, it depends on the provider.
If your small business has an expert (or if you are the expert), then you can probably choose GoDaddy or Liquid Web, as they offer a wide range of self-managed plans that give you a good combination of low-price and power.
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