The best cheap VPS hosting deals make it simple and easy for you to host your website with better speeds and more control over customizations – without breaking the bank.
VPS hosting bridges the gap between shared and dedicated hosting. Shared hosting is where your account is one of many small accounts sharing a web server. A dedicated server is where you rent the entire server, so that it is dedicated to your business.
VPS hosting offers a mix of both worlds, where only a handful of VPS accounts share the same server, but come with all the control and configuration options you get with a dedicated server – hence the name, Virtual Private Server (VPS).
This offers a number of advantages, not least that more resources are available to your account under a VPS that wouldn’t be available with a shared hosting account. Additionally, these resources tend to be ring-fenced, so that your VPS account won’t be slowed or disrupted if another account on the same server happens to get a spike in traffic.
VPS hosting also offers another benefit over shared hosting accounts, in that there’s more freedom to customize the server software and its settings according to your needs, something not normally possible with shared accounts.
Even better, because you are only renting a fraction of a server, you only pay a fraction of the price of a dedicated server. So you have the benefits of significantly more resources and customization options, all at a competitive cost. So while VPS costs more than shared hosting, it’s not often by much, and VPS hosting is always cheaper than the equivalent dedicated hosting.
However, if you worry that server management is beyond your IT skills, have no fear – many VPS hosting companies provide both managed and unmanaged options. This means you can pay a little extra to ensure your VPS server settings are looked after by the hosting company’s support team, so you don’t have to get your hands dirty. The cost increase is usually marginal as well, making VPS highly competitive in terms of price.
To determine the best budget VPS hosting options, we compared various providers on aspects like their uptime guarantee, security, and pricing. We also assessed their technical features, like the CPU cores, amount of RAM, storage, and bandwidth, along with other factors.
Here we’ll look at some of the cheapest VPS hosting deals out there.
We’ve also listed the best reseller hosting services.
The best cheap VPS hosting deals of 2024 in full:
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With no gimmicks, you will be very hard pressed to find a cheaper VPS deal with managed hosting. Hostwinds doesn’t do half measures when it comes to VPS and while you will be able to get more cores elsewhere, Hostwinds’ offer feels more balance.
$4.99 a month gets you an unmanaged Linux VPS with one core, 1GB of RAM, 30GB SSD storage space, 1TB bandwidth with a 1Gbps port (which allow for burstable traffic.) There’s even a 99.9999% power and network uptime guarantee, the highest we’ve ever seen at this price, which translates into a maximum downtime of 31.56 seconds over a year.
You do get root access and a huge choice of Linux distros (and versions). Unlike some cheaper competitors, you do not have to pay for a few essential things (WordPress daily backups and cPanel) and you still can enjoy free website transfers, and a long 60-day money back warranty.
Read our Hostwinds review.
IONOS brings a European flavor to the lower-end of the VPS market with its VPS Linux XS offering, one of the cheapest on the market.
A tiny $2 billed monthly buys one virtual core, 1GB of RAM, 10GB of SSD grade storage and unlimited traffic over a 1Gbps connection. You can choose the location of your data center (US, UK, Spain or Germany) and you have a choice of Linux distro (Alma, CentOS, Debian, Rocky, Ubuntu.)
As expected, you get full root access, snapshot backup as an option, an SSL Wildcard certificate and Plesk Onyx control panel. The account only supports two email addresses with 2GB inboxes, and you get a single IPv4 (but not IPv6) address, but it seems unfair to complain at a price like this. Even if you know you’ll probably need more, this plan still makes sense as a low-cost way to dip your toe into the VPS waters and learn how everything works.
Read our IONOS review.
As the designated data center partner for the Olympics committee, Alibaba Cloud happens to be the biggest cloud provider in China and its ECS (Elastic Compute Service) – which is its take on the VPS concept – is being aggressively marketed online as a compelling alternative to Amazon’s more expensive Lightsail VPS.
With 19 data center regions located worldwide and a starting price of only $4.50 per month, it is one of the cheapest VPS deals around. You get one vCore CPU, 1GB memory, 40GB of SSD storage, 1TB of data transfer plus a free anti-DDoS Basic service, automatic snapshots, and triplicated backups.
The data is far lower than the competition which means that the ECS starter pack is ideal for non-bandwidth hungry applications.
As with other rivals, it uses Intel Xeon E5 processors and SSDs, paired with Linux. It is also the only provider that serves the billion-plus Chinese audience directly (although you will need to apply for an ICP license to deploy your website).
Read our Alibaba Cloud review.
Hetzner might not be a well-known brand outside its home country (Germany) but this internet web hosting company punches above its weight despite having only 200 employees. It uses Skylake Xeon processors rather than the older Broadwell models and bundles 20TB of data with all its tiers. You pay by the month and there’s no minimum contract period.
Even the cheapest tier (€4.51 per month) comes with 2GB of RAM, 20GB of drive space (NVMe SSD), and one vCPU. All plans can use data centers located in Germany and Finland, which is great if you like strict European data protection regulations.
(US customers aren’t quite so lucky: Hetzner also has data centers in Oregon and Virginia, but they’re not available with every plan.)
Hetzner manages to keep prices low by offering only core features with its own proprietary cloud console. You have to pay for everything else including backup snapshots (€0.0131 per GB per month) and IP address (€1 per month).
Read our full Hetzner review.
OVH is the third European company in our list and the only one of that trio from outside Germany. At $6.44 per month (paid annually) for the VPS Value package, it includes local RAID-1, 40GB NVMe storage, one vCore, and 2GB RAM, twice what Alibaba Cloud or Ionos provides.
Five European data center locations are available plus one each in North America, Singapore and Australia. Uptime guarantee is 99.95%, slightly worse than, say, the Ionos package, and OVH is good at communicating what is available in its bundles.
Unmetered traffic over a 100Mbps port is included, as is anti-DDoS protection, KVM, root access, IPv4/IPv6 IP and free ready-to-go packages like WordPress, PrestaShop or CozyCloud.
Although it’s easy to setup, OVHcloud doesn’t provide any free trials or money-back guarantees with its services.
Read our OVHcloud review.
Liquid Web offers managed VPS services, so if you want more resources and power than a normal shared or reseller hosting plan, but don’t want the hassle of command line management of your own server, this could be ideal for you.
While a lot of companies aim to provide the lowest priced hosting, this can often come at the expense of poor or limited support, which can cause frustration in the event of a problem. Liquid Web is one of the companies that prices in the mid-range but provides top range support, so in the event of any issue you can usually be assured of a fast response.
Their VPS plans are priced according to the resources you want, such as the number of processors, RAM, hard drive space, etc. and all come with 10TB of monthly bandwidth, DDoS protection, WHM/cPanel, and SSD storage.
Read our Liquid Web review.
Still undecided? We’ve compared shared hosting vs VPS hosting.
How to choose the best cheap VPS hosting for you?
When choosing the best cheap VPS hosting you’ll want to start with considering your technical needs — the number of CPU cores, amount of RAM, storage, and bandwidth.
You’ll want to check the overall ease of setup, the number and location of the data centers, and the uptime guarantee. If your website receives heavy traffic, it’ll help you to opt for hosting providers that offer unlimited traffic.
Lastly, look out for pricing plans, minimum contracts, and customer support, among other things.
The best cheap VPS hosting: How we test
To test the best cheap VPS hosting, we looked at their pricing plans, contract requirements, and overall quality of hosting. We evaluated their technical specifications, like the CPU cores, RAM, storage, and bandwidth they offer.
We checked their security features, uptime guarantee, and configuration options too.
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