Best VPS services for 2024
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VPS (virtual private server) hosting is a cost-effective website hosting solution for small-to-medium businesses and scaling personal projects. Choosing the best VPS hosting service can be challenging because it heavily depends on your needs, like finding data centre servers in the UK to run an e-shop in the United Kingdom.
To help you decide, together with our research team, I overviewed 56 VPS hosting services and narrowed the list down to the finest 8 VPS hosting services. I began with their feature variety, pricing, and user and third-party reviews for initial comparison. Afterwards, our research team assisted in testing the final VPS services regarding uptime and average server response time.
This lets me provide you with an in-depth look at the best VPS hosting services for your needs in 2024. Here are my 8 top suggestions.
8 best VPS services 2024 – in short
- Bluehost – the best VPS hosting provider in 2024 overall
- Hostinger – VPS hosting with transparent deals
- Liquid Web – best fully-managed VPS hosting
- A2 Hosting – the cheapest unmanaged VPS hosting
- DreamHost – VPS hosting with free business email
- ScalaHosting – excellent cloud-based VPS hosting
- InterServer – solid VPS hosting for experienced users
- InMotion Hosting – great VPS hosting for large projects
Best VPS services – detailed overview:
Below is our top 8 best VPS hosting services in 2024 detailed analysis. You will find insights into their security features, user-friendliness, and pricing. Alongside this, our analysts tested uptime and average response time VPS hosting capabilities.
1. Bluehost – overall best VPS hosting in 2024
| Rating: | |
| Starting Price: | From £35.19/month |
| VPS features: | High performance, DDoS protection, 24/7 customer support |
| Best deal: | Get Bluehost VPS, now 33% OFF |
Bluehost is the #1 VPS hosting 2024 on our Cybernews list due to its ease of use, flexibility, and reliability. While it’s not the most affordable provider, its price is justified by its excellent features and suitability for different needs. Bluehost allows full root access, which means users have complete control over server configurations.
VPS support, management and configuration. Bluehost offers both managed and unmanaged VPS hosting, catering to a wide variety of users. It uses KVM visualisation for excellent isolation and performance. You also get free SSD storage, a user-friendly cPanel, and a dedicated IP address. All this makes a great choice for both professionals and beginners.
Resources and performance. To test Bluehost and other providers’ performance, we used the Pingodm tool for uptime and the GTmetrix tool for load times. Our tests showed excellent results of 99.9% uptime, even without data centres in the UK. Bluehost also offers up to 8 vCPU cores, 16GB of RAM, and 450GB of NVMe storage, all of which, together with its excellent uptime, contribute to your website’s fast load times and minimal downtime.
| Uptime test result: | 99.9% |
| Average response time: | 971ms |
Security. For security, Bluehost offers DDoS protection and an integrated firewall, and includes SSL certificates with all its plans. You can also enable automatic backups for added protection. Bluehost implements regular security patches, which ensure regular server updates with the latest protections.
Pricing. Bluehost’s VPS hosting prices start at £35.19/month for the Standard plan. It offers three VPS plans in total, all of which come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
2. Hostinger – semi-managed VPS hosting for smaller projects
| Rating: | |
| Starting Price: | From £4.24/month |
| VPS features: | Up to 8 vCPU cores, 400GB NVMe storage, 32GB RAM, worldwide data centres |
| Best deal: | Get up to 72% OFF Hostinger VPS |
Hostinger is also one of the best VPS providers due to its superb services at an affordable price. Its semi-managed hosting provides versatility to run an e-shop or a personal blog, starting from just £4.24/month.
VPS support, management and configuration. Hostinger VPS hosting works well with Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and other Linux distributions, making it a strong option for those seeking the best Linux VPS. It offers several pre-installed control panels, like Plesk and DirectAdmin. You can also get the popular cPanel for an additional cost. Each server provides a dedicated IP address with an automatic backup option for data security. Hostinger offers semi-managed VPN hosting, which means that most issues are handled by the administrator.
Resources and performance. Hostinger has servers in the US, Brazil, India, France, and Lithuania. The starter plan provides 50GB of NVMe SSD storage space, 1 vCPU core, and 4GB of RAM. You can scale it up to 8 vCPU cores, 400GB of storage, and 32GB of RAM and expect a 300Mbps network speed. During our two weeks of testing, Hostinger didn't have a single outage.
| Uptime test result: | 100% |
| Average response time: | 540ms |
Security. To protect your website, you will get a free SSL certificate, but with manual setup. Additionally, there is a user-friendly firewall, DDoS protection, automatic backups, and 24/7 live chat and email support.
Pricing. Hostinger has 4 VPS plans, with the cheapest one, KVM1, starting from £4.24/month if you get a 2-year subscription. Each plan requires a 24-month contract but is covered with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
3. Liquid Web – highly scalable VPS hosting
| Rating: | |
| Starting Price: | From $5.00/month |
| VPS features: | Up to 8 vCPU cores, 8GB RAM, 150GB SSD |
| Best deal: | Get up to 85% OFF Liquid Web VPS |
The Liquid Web is your best VPS that's fully managed. It can support large-scale projects and businesses due to its high-performance infrastructure and advanced management tools.
VPS support, management and configuration. Liquid Web VPS offers a proprietary InterWorx control panel and widely used cPanel and Plesk. It supports Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, and other Linux distributions and grants you root access to the virtual server. With Liquid Web, you can choose between managed and self-managed VPS hosting.
Resources and performance. The most affordable Cloud VPS plan provides 1GB of RAM and 30GB storage space run on 1 vCPU core. Like Bluehost, this VPS did not go down even once during our 2-weeks of testing. What's more, Liquid Web’s most expensive plan offers 12 cores so that it can meet larger hosting demands.
| Uptime test result: | 100% |
| Average response time: | 521ms |
Security. Liquid Web offers DDoS protection for no additional charge, which is standard for one of the best VPS hosting service providers. A strong firewall protects its servers, and there's anti-malware and real-time protection for an additional price. You can always contact customer support via live chat in case of trouble, which took less than a minute to respond to my query.
Pricing. The pricing starts at $5.00/month (billed monthly) for a basic Cloud VPS plan. Other plans are considerably more expensive compared to the likes of Hostinger, but that's to be expected from a fully-managed VPS.
4. A2 Hosting – VPS hosting with flexible plans
| Rating: | |
| Starting Price: | From $2.99/month |
| VPS features: | Up to 8 cores, 32GB RAM, 500GB NVMe SSD storage, free SSL |
| Best deal: | Get up to 66% OFF A2 Hosting VPS |
A2 Hosting is your best freedom-of-choice VPS with an abundance of plans for all needs. Its unmanaged plan starts at just $2.99/month, but the service scales up to an impressive 32GB RAM managed VPS for $110.95/month.
VPS support, management and configuration. A2 Hosting lets you choose either managed or unmanaged VPS plans. If you're familiar with VPS hosting, you can control your server environment and save money simultaneously opting for unmanaged hosting. On the other hand, the managed VPS plans offer free performance optimization and scalability.
Resources and performance. I found Turbo servers the most impressive A2 Hosting aspect. At a steep price, they offer 32GB RAM, 500GB NVMe SSD storage, and 8 cores. A2 Hosting also performed best regarding average response time (253ms) but had 1 outage of 5 minutes during our 2-week testing, which is also an excellent result.
| Uptime test result: | 99.98% |
| Average response time: | 253ms |
Security. Similarly to other top-notch VPS hosting services, A2 Hosting includes security necessities to protect a website. It provides server hardening and monitoring, a firewall, and DDoS protection. However, free SSL certificates are available only in managed hosting plans, costing extra for unmanaged VPS users.
Pricing. A2 Hosting unmanaged $2.99/month plan is one of the cheapest I have seen. For users without hosting experience, I recommend opting for the managed hosting plan. All plans have a 30-day money-back guarantee.
5. DreamHost – best VPS hosting for newcomers
| Rating: | |
| Starting Price: | From $10.00/month |
| VPS features: | Up to 12GB RAM, 360GB SSD storage, free SSL, unlimited traffic |
| Best deal: | Get DreamHost, now 72% OFF |
DreamHost VPS hosting is suited for growing businesses. It’s an affordable managed hosting starting at $10.00/month. User-friendly navigation and business email are noteworthy DreamHost’s advantages, but the hardware capabilities fall slightly short.
VPS support, management and configuration. DreamHost lets you relax with an easy-to-navigate proprietary control panel (DHCP) with an option to use popular alternatives, like cPanel. It’s a managed service and it doesn't provide root access, limiting customization, but I find it more beneficial for beginners.
Resources and performance. This VPS hardware capabilities start at 2GB RAM with 60GB SSD storage and goes up to a maximum of 12GB RAM and 360GB storage. However, it does not disclose the number of cores, which makes me doubt there's a lot. During our tests, the uptime remained at 100%, with a longer 710ms average response time.
| Uptime test result: | 100% |
| Average response time: | 710ms |
Security. You will get a free SSL certificate on any VPS plan and guaranteed DDoS protection. You can even get a malware removal tool, but it comes at an additional cost. There are automatic backups as well as 24/7 live chat and email support.
Pricing. There are 4 DreamHost VPS plans, each offering more RAM and storage space. The starting price is$10.00/month, but it falls short regarding server resources compared to Hostinger or A2 Hosting Turbo servers. There’s also the standard 30-day money-back guarantee.
6. ScalaHosting – secure VPS hosting service
| Rating: | |
| Starting Price: | From $14.98/month |
| VPS features: | Up to 8 CPU cores, 16GB RAM, 150GB NVMe SSD, unmetered bandwidth |
| Best deal: | Get up to 80% OFF ScalaHosting VPS |
ScalaHosting offers cloud-based managed VPS hosting starting from $14.98/month. It uses an intuitive proprietary SPanel and offers automatic offsite backups on all plans.
VPS support, management and configuration. The pre-configured servers allow using ScalaHosting immediately, which is fast and easy-using SPanel. The provider boasts swift NVMe SSD storage of up to 2000Mbps and provides full root access and unmetered bandwidth, but using a cPanel costs extra.
Resources and performance. The fast SSD storage is ScalaHosting's primary advantage, which is available on all plans. The Entry plan offers 2 CPU cores, 2GB of RAM, and 50GB of storage. The most extensive Build #3 plan offers 8 cores, 16GB RAM, and 150GB storage, which is more limited compared to other services on this list. Our 2-week tests revealed a flawless 100% uptime.
| Uptime test result: | 100% |
| Average response time: | 443ms |
Security. All plans get a free SSL certificate. What's more, ScalaHosting offers a free SShield feature and claims it blocks 99.97% of web-based attacks and also alerts of breaches. This VPS backs up your data daily and automatically in a different data centre, so security-wise, it's one of the best VPS hosting solutions.
Pricing. ScalaHosting price starts from $14.98/month on a 36-month contract for a cloud-based VPS plan. There are three other VPS plans, reaching the price of $115.95/month. I must note that you can also custom-build your own plan, but it will come at a cost.
7. InterServer – VPS hosting without contracts
| Rating: | |
| Starting Price: | From $3.00/month |
| VPS features: | Up to 8 CPU cores, 8GB RAM, 240GB storage |
| Best deal: | Get Interserver VPS for just $3.00/month |
InterServer is another cloud-based VPS hosting that starts from only $3.00/month for Linux VPS and from $5.00/month for Windows hosting. They provide managed support but only on more powerful plans.
VPS support, management and configuration. This VPS is tailored for experienced users, so InterServer provides full root access. For an additional charge, you can use cPanel on Linux or Plesk on Windows. There are also dozens of scripts with one-click installation to choose from.
Resources and performance. InterServer has comparably limited server resources, ranging from 1 to 8 CPU cores, 1GB to 8GB RAM, and up to 240GB storage. Its data centres are located only in the US, which resulted in a not-so-good 1.1s average response time during our test. However, it had a perfect 100% uptime.
| Uptime test result: | 100% |
| Average response time: | 1.1ms |
Security. This VPS offers free SSL certificates and DDoS protection. The daily VPS hosting backups come at an extra charge, and I found only outdated information about malware scanning. I recommend this only to experienced users who know their way around cybersecurity.
Pricing. The cheapest InterServer Linux VPS plan costs $3.00/month for 1 core, 1GB RAM, and 15GB storage. I must also pinpoint that there are no long-term contracts, but also no money-back guarantee.
8. InMotion Hosting – VPS hosting with powerful servers
| Rating: | |
| Starting Price: | From $4.99/month |
| VPS features: | Up to 16 vCPU cores, 32GB RAM, 460GB NVMe SSD, unlimited bandwidth |
| Best deal: | Get up to 82% OFF InMotion Hosting VPS |
InMotion Hosting offers both managed and unmanaged VPS hosting services. This service focuses on large-scale projects so that you get more server resources at a slightly increased price, starting from $4.99/month with a 3-year contract.
VPS support, management and configuration. Although InMotion Hosting is best for larger websites, it uses cPanel, which is beginner-friendly. This VPS offers dedicated IPs, free website transfers, and a choice of an alternative control panel. I also value that all plans above the most basic one offer unlimited bandwidth.
Resources and performance. Abundant server resources are the main InMotion Hosting selling point. Even its most limited plan offers 4 vCPU cores, 8GB of RAM, and 160GB SSD storage, but with limited 5TB bandwidth. More expensive plans remove the bandwidth limit, and you can get up to 16 cores, 32GB RAM, and 460GB NVMe SSD storage space. Our tests reflect the capabilities with no outages during 2 weeks.
| Uptime test result: | 100% |
| Average response time: | 585ms |
Security. InMotion Hosting offers free SSL certificates and DDoS protection on all plans. Additionally, there's a cybersecurity Monarx feature, which scans your files in real-time for malicious elements. The numerous support options include 24/7 live chat, email, phone support, ticket, and Skype.
Pricing. The cheapest deal starts from $4.99/month, but you can also get better support and 10GB of backup storage by getting a VPS 12vCPU plan for $31.99/month. This is the only VPS hosting service on the list with a 90-day money-back guarantee.
Best VPS services compared
| Provider | Rating | Starting price | CPU cores | RAM | Storage | Bandwidth |
| Bluehost | £35.19/month | Up to 8 vCPU cores | 16GB RAM | Up to 450GB of NVMe storage | Unmetered | |
| Hostinger | £4.24/month | Up to 8 vCPU cores | 32GB RAM | Up to 400GB NVMe storage | From 4TB to 32TB | |
| Liquid Web | $5.00/month | Up to 8 vCPU cores | 8GB RAM | Up to 150GB SSD storage | From 1TB to 10TB | |
| A2 Hosting | $2.99/month | Up to 8 cores | 32GB RAM | Up to 500GB NVMe SSD storage | From 2TB to 4TB | |
| DreamHost | $2.59/month | Undisclosed | 12GB RAM | Up to 360GB SSD storage | Unlimited | |
| ScalaHosting | $14.98/month | Up to 8 CPU cores | 16GB RAM | 150GB NVMe SSD storage | Unmetered | |
| InterServer | $3.00/month | Up to 8 CPU cores | 8GB RAM | 240GB SSD storage | Undisclosed | |
| InMotion | $4.99/month | Up to 16 vCPU cores | 32GB RAM | 460GB NVMe SSD storage | From 5TB to unlimited |
VPS ranking methodology
The first VPS ranking methodology step is the overview of the VPS hosting market situation, which you can read more in how we test website hosting article. Afterward, we select the services that meet our criteria for tests. Lastly, we rank them according to each performance, following the criteria outlined below.
- Essential and additional features (30%). These features form the core of the best VPS hosting services. They include root access controls, operating system availability, control panel choice (Plesk, cPanel, proprietary), 24/7 customer support, and speedy SSD storage. Additional features like automatic backups, dedicated IPs, and cloud integration are a significant advantage.
- Speed tests (30%). To select the best VPS hosting services in 2024, we test services chosen for 2 weeks, expecting 100%, or close to that, uptime and as close average response time to the recommended 200ms as possible. For this, we use the Pingdom tool.
- Security features (20%). It's paramount to verify available VPS hosting security features when trusting your website with them. We double-check SSL certificates (preferably free), firewall or other anti-malware tool availability, and DDoS protection.
- Pricing and hardware (20%). A VPS is like a middle ground between shared hosting and expensive dedicated servers. A good VPS hosting provider should have plans tailored for small personal projects and websites but also scale to support more traffic on demand. All plans should have sufficient hardware, like CPU cores, RAM, and storage space.
How to choose a VPS server
A suitable and reliable VPS service provider ensures your website is secure, loads fast, and is ready to scale. Here are a few things you should consider before purchasing:
- Unmanaged or managed. Firstly, choose between unmanaged hosting, which requires extensive hosting knowledge from the user, or managed, where the service provider takes care of the technicalities.
- Server resources. Approximate what server resources you need. Static websites, like blogs, can do with a few GB of RAM. Meanwhile, online stores or traffic-heavy news sites require more computational power, storage, and bandwidth.
- Root access. You will need full root access if you want customization freedom and more control. The managed hosting without it requires less effort from the user but is more expensive.
- Pricing. Many choose VPS as a cost-effective solution. Compare the service price with the required feature availability to make an optimal choice.
Final thoughts
Picking a suitable VPS hosting provider is an important decision that you will stick with for a few years. The wellbeing of your website depends on it, so together with our research team I reviewed 50 available services and tested the 8 best VPS hosting services in 2024.
The top spot goes to Bluehost, which offers excellent VPS features and great server resources for your growing business or eCommerce site starting at $46.99/month.
You can also explore best Black Friday VPS offers while checking other VPS hosting providers on my list – they all cater to the different VPS needs of various users, from beginners to professionals.
Best VPS FAQ
Which is the fastest VPS server?
The fastest VPS service is A2 Hosting, which, during our tests, maintained a 253ms average response time. Hostinger and InMotion Hosting are also up the list regarding connection speed, and they all utilise speedy NVMe SSD storage hardware.
How safe is VPS?
Generally, a VPS hosting solution is considered a more secure alternative to shared hosting. Each virtual server is isolated from the other, preventing threats from spreading from one compromised account to others. However, VPS hosting does not offer resource isolation found on dedicated servers.
Is VPS better than shared web hosting?
Yes, in most instances, VPS hosting outperforms the shared hosting solution. It provides better and more powerful hardware that is distributed more efficiently to maximise website load speed, server response time, and, in turn, better ranking on the Google search engine.
