VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting simulates a dedicated hosting environment within a shared server environment. As a result, it provides better performance and security than shared hosting. In this review, we have handpicked the eight best free VPS hosting providers on the market today. Each host has been evaluated based on what features they offer, how well they function, and how much value they provide. Moreover, we have outlined the pros and cons of each provider and how to start using them for free.
Our Best Free VPS Hosting Recommendation
Top Pick
Hostinger
Why We Don’t Recommend Free VPS Hosting
Here are some limitations you need to be aware of when choosing a free VPS hosting solution:
- Bandwidth and storage limitations
- Lack of security measures
- No customer support or very limited support options
- Usually lacks in performance (speed and uptime)
- Possible scam (especially considering there is little to no information about the free VPS hosting companies)
- Account activation might take weeks or more
Even if your main aim is to get to know VPS hosting, we recommend opting for VPS providers offering a free trial or a money-back guarantee.
Best Free VPS Server Hosting Platforms: Windows and Linux
5 Best Value VPS Hosting Solutions with Free Trial
Now let’s have a look at the four best-value VPS hosting companies that come with a price tag but also offer a free trial to test out their services.
1) Hostinger – Best Entry-Level Pricing
Hostinger is an employee-owned company that was established in 2004 in Kaunas, Lithuania, and is also a parent company of Hosting24, Zyro (a well-known website builder), and 000webhost. Apart from shared hosting, they offer WordPress, VPS, and cloud hosting.
#1 Top Pick
Hostinger
5.0
✓ Free Domain & SSL Certificate
✓ Free Easy to Use Website Builder
✓ Managed WordPress
✓ Weekly Backups
✓ 24/7 Support (ticket, chat)
✓ 99% Uptime Guarantee
30-day money-back guarantee
Features:
- Dedicated IP address
- Network File System (NFS) support
- Full root access
- Backups and snapshots
- Built-in advanced DDoS protection
- BitNinja’s full-stack server protection
- IPV and IPV6 support
- 99.9% server uptime guarantee – if they fail to deliver the promised uptime, you are eligible for a 5% credit of your monthly hosting fee in a particular month.
Hostinger is using a custom-made control panel called hPanel. Users can manage files, databases, emails, and domains with hPanel
Key Specs:
Data Centers: Several free VPS servers in the US, the UK, Singapore, The Netherlands, and Lithuania
Customer Support: 24/7/365 customer support
Speed and Performance: Intel Xeon server processors, terabytes of NVMe SSD storage, 512 GB RAM, 100 Mb/s Network
Supported Operating System (OS): Linux (CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Suse)
Free Trial: 30-day money-back guarantee.
Pricing:
Hostinger offers several VPS hosting plans that are also very affordable:
Note: All the above prices are applicable when signing up with Hostinger for 48 months.
How to Get Hostinger for Free
- Go to hostinger.com
- Choose a suitable hosting plan and sign up for their VPS plan
- They offer a 30-day money-back guarantee which you can cancel anytime within the time criteria by contacting their customer support. You’ll receive a refund to the original payment source.
30-day money-back guarantee
2) Bluehost – Best Beginner-Friendly VPS Hosting
Bluehost is one of the most well-established brands in the hosting industry. They were founded in 2003 by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth in Provo, Utah, and are now powering over two million websites all over the world.
Moreover, they are one of the official WordPress.org’s recommended hosts. You’ll also get multi-server and file management where you can add more VPS, shared or dedicated servers to your account and manage it all in one place.
Features:
- Dedicated IP addresses (1-2)
- cPanel/WHM
- Root access and SSH
- Unlimited domains and websites
- Free domain name
- Instant provisioning
- SSL Certificate
Optional features you’d have to purchase for an extra fee include Codeguard basic, Single domain SSL, and SiteLock Security Essential.
Key Specs:
Data Centers: Several servers in the US, India, Europe, and China
Customer Support: 24/7/365 in-house customer support
Speed and Performance: Solid State Drives (SSD)
Supported Operating System (OS): Linux (CentOS)
Free Trial: 30-day money-back guarantee.
Pricing:
All the above prices apply if you sign up for 36 months.
How to Get Bluehost for Free
- Navigate to Bluehost.com and choose a suitable VPS hosting plan (the Standard plan is good if you’re starting out)
- Create an account
- To try out Bluehost’s VPS trial, you can take advantage of their 30-day money-back guarantee with every VPS hosting plan. You can cancel anytime by contacting their customer service, and you’ll be refunded to your original payment source.
30-day money-back guarantee
3) DigitalOcean – Best Cloud VPS
DigitalOcean is a renowned VPS hosting provider, a one-stop solution for startups and SMBs. They offer a free trial of their VPS services, where you’ll get $200 worth of credits to use for 60 days. DigitalOcean also eliminates the hassle of building tools, data storage, networking, etc., from scratch so that you can entirely focus on your product.
With DigitalOcean, you can get a personalized experience that will help you build and grow faster without any roadblocks. Under the umbrella of the exceptional product suite of DigitalOcean you can get guidance from experts at every step of your journey.
Features:
- You can collect metrics on visibility, monitor Droplet performance, and get instant alerts when problems arise in your infra.
- You can secure your VPS with free cloud firewalls
- It helps you to securely and efficiently collaborate on projects with unlimited users.
- Easy app building and deployment
- You can use snapshots to backup indefinitely and use them to create new Droplets (VPS).
- You can store and deliver vast amounts of content with S3-compatible Spaces.
- Avoid single points of failure by assigning publicly accessible static IP addresses.
- You can attach secure and scalable SSD-based Block Storage to your VPS Droplet.
- Load balancing helps you to distribute incoming traffic across a group of droplets.
Key Specs:
Data centers: USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, India, UK and more
Customer support: Support ticket and Email.
Speed and performance: 99.99% Uptime
Free trial: 60-day credit for new users.
Transparent pricing: The pricing policy is clear with understandable terms.
Managed database: Managed MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB.
Integration: S3 compatible tools, API, CLI.
Security: Data transfer encryption with HTTPS.
Pricing:
DigitalOcean has many products and calls its Virtual Private Server offering a Droplet. Even its VPS are optimized for different use cases like Memory optimized, CPU Optimized, Storage Optimized. Here is cost of a general VPS.
How to Get DigitalOcean for Free
- Go to https://www.digitalocean.com/
- Choose a Droplet and sign up for their VPS plan. Credit card is required.
- You will get 60 days of credit as a new user.
$200 Credit Free
4) HostPapa – Best Security Options
HostPapa is a privately owned web hosting provider that was founded in Canada in 2006. In 2016, they provided hosting services for over 180,000 websites worldwide.
Besides shared hosting, WordPress, and resellers hosting, HostPapa offers affordable managed and self-managed VPS hosting.
Features:
HostPapa packs many useful features that are necessary for a successful VPS hosting experience.
Here are some of the essential ones:
- Dedicated IP addresses
- Migration assistance (with their fully managed VPS plan)
- Root access SSH (not applicable with their fully managed VPS plan)
- FTP accounts
- MySQL 5.7 databases
- cPanel control panel
- SSL Certificate
- Server firewall
- DDoS protection
- Brute force detection
- RAID redundancy
- IP deny manager
- FTPS
- Monitoring tools
- 99.9% Network SLA Guarantee – if uptime falls below the given guarantee, you will receive equivalent credit calculated by HostPapa’s billing team.
Key Specs:
Data Centers: 102 servers globally, including in the US, Europe, Africa, Oceania, Asia Pacific, China Mainland, and the Middle East.
Customer Support: 24/7 VPS support.
Speed and Performance: Enhanced SSD drives with the latest Intel Xeon processors.
Supported Operating System (OS): Linux (CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian).
Free Trial: 30-day money-back guarantee.
Pricing:
HostPapa offers a self-managed, managed, and fully managed VPS hosting service.
Here is the pricing for their four VPS plans:
Note: The above prices are applicable when you sign up with HostPapa for 36 months with their self-managed VPS hosting option.
How to Get HostPapa for Free
- Go to Hostpapa.com
- Choose a suitable hosting plan (the Mercury plan is a good option to start with) and sign up
- They have a free VPS trial for 30 days. It means you have a whole month to try out their services, and if you’re not happy with them, you can ask for a refund by contacting their customer support. You’ll get a refund within 90 days from the cancellation.
30-day money-back guarantee
5) ScalaHosting – Best Value VPS Hosting
ScalaHosting is a web hosting company that has been on the market already from 2007. By now, they host over 700,000 websites worldwide.
ScalaHosting offers numerous services, including shared, managed, WordPress, and reseller hosting. However, their emphasis goes on cloud-based managed and self-managed VPS hosting.
Features:
Here are the important features of Scala Hosting:
- Free website migration
- SShield is state-of-the-art security protection that blocks 99.998% of the incoming threats to your website and monitors your site in real-time
- Dedicated IP address
- HTTP/3 support
- Free snapshots
- Scalable resources (bandwidth, storage, RAM, etc.)
- Custom robust SPanel control panel that has all the features as cPanel but also supports Nginx and OpenLiteSpeed servers and has a lightweight (can even run-on VPS less than 1 GB RAM) resource usage.
- Root access
- Uptime Guarantee – In case they are not able to provide the promised uptime, then you are eligible for credit depending on your downtime.
For example, if your uptime is 99.98%, you will receive a 10% credit that will be transferred to your account in seven days.
Key Specs:
Data Centers: Several data centers are located in the US and Europe.
Customer Support: 24/7/365 Customer support and proactive monitoring.
Speed and Performance: LiteSpeed, HTTP/2, LSCache, PHP7.
Supported Operating System (OS): Windows and Linux (CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE).
Free Trial: 30-day money-back guarantee.
Pricing:
Scala Hosting offers four fully managed cloud hosting plans:
How to Get ScalaHosting for Free
- Create an account
- Choose a plan – We recommend the Start Plan, which is the cheapest. Complete the payment.
- ScalaHosting comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Any time before the 30-day expires, contact customer support and ask for a refund. The refund usually arrives at the original payment source in 4-5 business days.
30-day money-back guarantee
4 Best Free VPS Hosting Solutions
Now let’s have a look at the completely free VPS providers.
1) Amazon Web Services (AWS) Hosting – Best Windows VPS
Amazon Web Services (also known as AWS) is one of the leading platforms by market share. They provide various services (including hosting) to enterprises, software developers, and many more.
With AWS hosting’s free service, website owners can learn about VPS systems easily. In addition to free service for one year, the plans also include tutorials to help you get started.
Features:
To make it easier to understand, we’re going to show you the features of the “Amazon Lightsail” plan:
- Customizable memory, vCPU, SSD storage
- Static IP addresses
- DNS management
- One-click shell protocol (SSH) terminal access for Linux
- Server monitoring
- One-click RDP access for Windows
- Reliable uptime and page loading time
With AWS Free Tier, you can sign up and get one year free of 50 GB CDN distributions and 5 GB storage.
Key Specs:
Data Centers: The AWS spans 84 availability networks within 26 geographic regions.
Customer Support: Knowledge base and support center.
Speed and Performance: Solid State Drives (SSD), CDN.
Supported Operating System (OS): Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenSUSE, Windows.
Free Trial: 12-month free trial.
Pricing: Price based on the pay-as-you-go model
Here are two examples of their paid plans:
Once the free trial expires, you’ll continue paying standard pay-as-you-go service rates.
How to Get it Free
- Register for AWS 1 Year free tier
- Login, select a Windows or Linux AMI (Amazon Machine Image)
- Deploy. Wait for 5 minutes. Your VPS is ready to use
Link: https://aws.amazon.com/free/
2) Free VPSHosti
Free VPSHosti is a hosting company that offers free hosting services and free domain registration services.
This hosting provider doesn’t ask for money in return for their services. Their free managed VPS plans are surprisingly packed with many useful hosting features.
Features:
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- Free site migrations
- Reliable email services
- IP addresses
- Free domain name
- SShield Protection
- Backups and snapshots
Key Specs:
Data Centers: Amsterdam and Chicago
Customer Support: 24/7 ticketing and phone
Speed and Performance: SSD and HDD disk space. Data redundancy is maintained by Raid.
Supported Operating System (OS): Linux (CentOS).
Free Trial: All plans are free all time.
Pricing:
Link: https://freevpshosti.net/vps-hosting.php
3) Alavps
Alavps is a hosting company that doesn’t share much information about itself, so where and when it was founded will remain unknown. Besides a free VPS plan, Alavps also offers shared hosting and dedicated servers. Moreover, they also have cloud hosting and domain registration services.
Features:
Even though being free, Alavps offers generously many handy features:
- cPanel control panel
- Free setup
- Pure SSD servers
- DDoS protection
- Full root access
- Weekly backups
- Vulnerability reports
- CDN
- 24/7 server monitoring
- MailEnable server
Key Specs:
Data Centers: Several locations in the US
Customer Support: 24/7 support (live chat is unresponsive)
Speed and Performance: Optimized SSD servers
Supported Operating System (OS): Linux and Windows
Free Trial: All-time free VPS packages
Pricing:
Alavps offers four fully managed VPS hosting plans from which one plan is free of charge for you:
Link: https://alavps.com/vps.html
4) InstaFree
InstaFree was founded in 2004, providing free hosting services such as shared hosting, reseller, and VPS hosting.
Together with their free hosting services, they also offer affordable premium packages.
Features:
- Helpful community
- Free website transfer
- 1IPv6 address
- DDoS protection
- cPanel control panel
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
Key Specs:
Data centers: several locations in the US
Customer support: 24/7 support for shared and reseller hosting
Speed and performance: Optimized SSD servers
Supported operating system (OS): Linux
Free trial: Free VPS hosting at all times
Pricing:
InstaFree offers one free VPS plan and three premium VPS hosting packages:
Link: https://www.instafree.com/free-vps.php
Verdict:
- If you want the best value for money and ensure that your business is in its top performance, go with ScalaHosting.
- If your emphasis is on website security, choose HostPapa.
- In case you’re on a tight budget but don’t want to choose a completely free VPS option, then Hostinger is for you.
- If you’re interested in Windows VPS hosting, then AWS Hosting solutions might be the right fit for you.
FAQ:
Best Free VPS Hosting Providers: Top Picks
https://www.guru99.com/best-free-vps-hosting.html
