Nearly every college student, business owner and creative needs a website to help promote themselves. In college, my professor taught me that the best way to stand out during the hiring process is to have a website that showcases your portfolio and your personality. A polished, professional website will help you stand out and draw in potential employers or customers. Building your own website can be daunting at first, but the best place to start is by choosing the right server for your needs.
After making a basic website, you might find that people are discovering it in all sorts of ways. To manage traffic surges or to expand your site with an online store or other features, you might need to upgrade your hosting plan. This is a perfect opportunity to consider virtual private server hosting; a choice that gets you more resources in terms of storage, CPU, RAM and bandwidth so your site continues to run smoothly as it grows.
Let's take a close look at some of the best VPS hosting services available. These include options you may have heard of, like DreamHost, A2Hosting and GoDaddy Web Hosting. For our list, I've focused on the best VPS hosting companies, selecting ones that provide 24/7 customer support and a variety of hosting plans.
What is VPS hosting?
There are three basic tiers to remote hosting options:
- Shared hosting: Typically the most basic, least expensive plan available from a web host provider, which many people building a website start off with. While a shared hosting provider should have everything you need for a personal or small business site, you are sharing resources with others on the same server, so if your site grows, you may need a different plan.
- VPS hosting:Essentially a step up from shared hosting, VPS allows you to get similar capabilities and performance to a dedicated server for your site without going up to a pricier dedicated server service. There are two types of VPS hosting: managed hosting and unmanaged hosting (more below).
- Dedicated server hosting:Typically the most expensive plan available from VPS providers, a dedicated server host hosts only one website, not multiple ones. That means you don't have to share any resources with other sites, so you'll get far better performance.
The best VPS hosting plan will look different based upon your needs. Continue reading to learn more about which VPS providers we recommend.
When should you choose VPS hosting over shared hosting?
Shared hosting works best for smaller sites that don't get lots of traffic or require many resources. Many people creating a website for the first time start with a shared plan. Because it is easy to find this out there for little to no money, it's the best VPS hosting on a budget for beginners. If you discover that your website has suddenly upped its demands, whether in terms of traffic or adding an online store, or performance or security suddenly entered your sphere of concern, it's most likely the right time for you to upgrade your site, picking the best VPS hosting plan for your specific needs.
What's the difference between unmanaged and managed VPS hosting?
A managed VPS hosting service is typically more expensive, yes. It is best for those with less technical backgrounds, as it lets the company take care of the software and system updates you request. An unmanaged VPS hosting service means the hosting provider is only responsible for the physical server and making sure it's available. You'll need to take care of maintenance, upgrades and software installation, which can add up compared to a managed VPS plan.
How we chose the best VPS hosting service
It's important to note that we didn't explicitly "test" the VPS hosting provider options on this list. Instead, we compiled a competitive overview based on a variety of factors, including third-party ratings and features offered by each web hosting company and shared hosting provider. We've also weighted the rankings of each hosting service by the Better Business Bureau and TrustPilot.
The VPS host vendors on this list all have a rating of A or higher from the Better Business Bureau and a rating of 3.8 or higher out of 5 from TrustPilot. Except for three vendors with between 300 and 400 pieces of user feedback, all of the TrustPilot rankings are based on at least 1,000 user reviews. All of the vendors listed in our top picks also say they offer 24/7 support and an uptime guarantee of 99% or better.
Important caveats you should keep in mind: The Better Business Bureau does not rate companies outside of North America, and to be BBB Accredited, companies have to pay a fee to the organization. TrustPilot also offers a paid tier that provides companies more interaction with their user ratings. It removed 2.2 million fake reviews in 2020.
A note on pricing:We've made every effort to verify that the prices listed here were accurate at the time of the last publication. Prices in this category are subject to frequent fluctuations and they're consistently subject to special offers and limited deals. Furthermore, many of the VPS provider prices listed here reflect the monthly rates if you prepay for 12 months of service or more. Please click through to the vendors in question to verify current pricing at any given time. Now, let's get started on our list of the best VPS hosting providers for 2024.
Best VPS hosting providers
With an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau and 4.7 out of 5 stars on TrustPilot, DreamHost is one of our most recommended web hosting providers for several reasons. First, it offers a custom control panel, which allows you to more easily manage your own hosting. While live phone customer support isn't available 24/7, the provider is responsive to live chat and tickets. DreamHost also uses superfast SSDs for all its storage, has a free SSL certificate (for more secure web browsing) and provides SSH access for those plans that are intended for more technical users.
Other things we like about Dreamhost: It offers free shared website and email hosting to 501(c)(3) nonprofits. For all others, the pricing is pretty transparent; there are no hidden gotchas in the rates. Plus, it provides a 97-day money-back guarantee, one of the most generous offers available.
Photo Gallery 1/1
SiteGround has an A+ rating from the BBB and 4.8 out of 5 stars on TrustPilot. It sits in the middle ground between a consumer web hosting provider and one that caters to businesses. If you've got a small business with more complex web needs than is typical, SiteGround is ideal. If your business expands, the service has options to grow with you.
If you go up to its GoGeek plan, you'll get several other useful features, including access to a staging server and one-click Git repo creation. All of its plans include SSL, daily backup, CDN, email, unmetered traffic and unlimited databases. It also differs from some other services in that it sets limits on bandwidth and storage up front, whereas most others claim to be unlimited bandwidth or unmetered bandwidth but have rules in the fine print (more on that below). You'll also get a 30-day money-back guarantee and a 100% renewable energy match.
SiteGround's managed cloud hosting plan is a little different from other VPS plans it's a fully managed option, and offers more hardware control and availability, plus more responsive provisioning -- hence the higher price tag.
As is the case with most other services, if you want to get the lowest price, you'll have to pay for a year of service in advance. After that year, the price will go up. Support includes 24/7 live chat and phone access, and tickets that are answered in an average of 15 minutes.
GreenGeeks has an A+ rating from the BBB and 4.1 out of 5 stars on TrustPilot. If you've ever been worried about the tremendous amount of power large data centers consume, you might want to check out this service to see if it offers the best VPS hosting for you. The "green" in the company's name reflects GreenGeeks' commitment to the environment. It buys three times the energy it uses in wind energy credits, essentially putting energy back into the economy. The company does this in the form of renewable energy certificates, which means that it's not just energy-neutral, it's actually helping fuel the green energy economy.
Although it's green, GreenGeeks still offers a lot of power for your websites. Its basic shared web hosting plan offers unlimited web space and email accounts, unmetered data transfer, an SSL certificate, a free domain name for the first year, a nightly backup, CDN and a 30-day money-back guarantee. It also offers live chat and email support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. It has phone support most hours of the day.
GreenGeeks is one of the more developer-friendly web hosting providers, with multiple PHP versions and Git preinstalled.
GoDaddy has an A+ rating from the BBB and 4.7 out of 5 stars on TrustPilot. While the site is perhaps best known for buying domain names, it also offers a variety of web hosting services, including WordPress, WordPress e-commerce and reseller hosting. It does not offer cloud hosting.
The service's most basic shared hosting plan includes unmetered bandwidth, a one-click WordPress install, a domain and Office 365 email (for the first year).
GoDaddy offers 24/7 phone support and live chat support as well.
Ionos from 1&1 has an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau and a TrustPilot score of 4.5 out of 5. It's targeted at small and medium-sized businesses, with a focus on taking your first steps online or scaling up. You'll find several different hosting plans and options, including WordPress hosting, email hosting and domain names and transfers. Just be careful when it comes to pricing; a lot of the hosting package rates seem low, but go up after a certain amount of time.
HostPapa has an A+ BBB rating and a 4.8 out of 5 TrustPilot rating. It's a small-business-focused hosting service that also offers free domain transfer. It offers a wide variety of plan types and several add-on features, such as a website builder and automatic website backup.
Unlike some of the other services, HostPapa also has a really nice Q&A section on every page to help you figure out which plan is best for you. That may make it the best VPS hosting for you if you'd like a lot of guidance without needing to call customer support.
Hostinger is based in Lithuania, so it doesn't have a BBB page (that organization only lists US-based businesses). It does have a TrustPilot rating of 4.6 out of 5 with more than 24,000 reviews.
Hostinger offers several different plans with a variety of pricing tiers (though many of the prices listed above are for the most basic form of the service, and may not include all the features you want). It's also got email hosting and a website builder, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
A2 Hosting has an A+ rating from the BBB and 4.6 out of 5 stars on TrustPilot. The company does a lot of things right: With every plan, the web hosting service includes SSD, site migration, an SSL certificate and CloudFlare CDN (a group of servers worldwide that automatically determines the best route to connect visitors to your site for increased speed and security). Its Anycast DNS tech duplicates DNS records across its global network, increasing site performance, according to the site.
Customer support is also strong: A2 Hosting's Guru Grew support team is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year by phone, email, online chat or ticket.
As with most web hosting providers, the published pricing is a bit misleading: The shared web-hosting price tag of $3 a month is only available if you sign up for the one-year plan and pay upfront. It offers a 30-day money-back guarantee or a prorated refund for unused service after that point.
Hostwinds has an A+ rating from the BBB and 4.1 out of 5 stars from TrustPilot. Its web hosting offerings are best suited for business owners, with specific business hosting plans and reseller hosting plans. Hostwinds also offers managed or unmanaged virtual private server hosting for Windows and Linux.
The service's shared hosting plans include a couple of key features, like SSDs, free website transfers, unlimited domains, email accounts and databases, a free SSL certificate and a Weebly site builder.