Best VPS Hosting 2024

If you don’t have time to read the whole article, our #1 pick for VPS hosting is Liquid Web. Fastest VPS, 100% network uptime & top notch support. Prices start from $15/month. Visit Liquid Web to see their VPS hosting plans or read their review below.

Here are the best VPS hosting companies based on our expert analysis

#1: Liquid Web VPS Hosting

LiquidWebLiquid Web Hosting is simply the most outstanding hosting service in the world overall, and this certainly extends to their VPS hosting. Quality really matters in a hosting service, and perhaps especially so with VPS hosting, and Liquid Web Hosting really delivers quality.

It’s not just about the speed of Liquid Web’s VPS service, although this is a business where speed really counts. Liquid Web excels in all the things that matter to their customers, affordability, security, flexibility, support, everything you would want from the qualitative leader in the industry.

What really sets out the great from the merely good is the quality of its management service, and while you can get VPS hosting without the management, most people prefer their host manage things, and great management can really influence performance and customer satisfaction. This is perhaps what has Liquid Web Hosting standing out the most.

With Liquid Web, you get to benefit from the entirety of the company’s engineering expertise, the sort of thing the biggest sites enjoy through dedicated server hosting, without having to pay for a dedicated server. Liquid Web Hosting is our top recommendation for dedicated server hosting, and you get the same great team that leads the way in the top echelon, in a partitioned format suitable to your needs and budget.

Liquid Web Hosting also leads the way in customer satisfaction, with an industry leading NPS score of 67. They earn our top recommendation in the VPS hosting arena as well, because we prefer the best.

LiquidWeb VPS Hosting Vs Other Popular Hosts

Hosting Comparison →LiquidWebHostgatorGoDaddy
Uptime SLAs100%99.9%99.9%
24/7 On-site Support
Proactive Monitoring by Default
Off Server Backups By Default
Multi-level DDoS Protection
Fast SSD Storage
RAM4GB4GB4GB

LiquidWeb Private VPS Parent

LiquidWeb’s Private VPS Parent allows you to create your own private cloud environment. You can create/destroy, move, resize any number of virtual instances within it. The range of Standard Private VPS Parent plans start from $149/mo and go up to $699/mo. They’re ideal for hosting small websites, apps and much more. Their High Performance Private VPS Parent plans start from $579/mo and go up to $699/mo. These are ideal for SaaS, hosting multiple sites/apps, databases and much more. You can also customize these plans according to your specifications.

Features & Addons – LiquidWeb Private VPS Parent

Root AccessServerSecure Advanced SecurityBlock Storage
Unlimited Sites with InterWorxGigabit UplinkObject Storage
Plesk & cPanel AvailableCloudFlare CDNIntegrated Backups
SSD Storage100% Network & Power Uptime SLAsVPN
Dedicated IP AddressSingle Tenant ServersFirewalls
DDoS Attack ProtectionLoad BalancersPremium Business Email

#2: DreamHost VPS Hosting

Dreamhost HostingDreamHost Hosting is another world-class hosting company that does everything extremely well, which is something we definitely need to see from a host if they are to get our recommendation. Even if you feel that a second or third tier host will do, there’s no reason whatsoever to settle when you can go with better options like DreamHost who offer packages to suit everyone’s needs, starting for as little as $10 a month.

There are VPS hosts that will offer you entry price points like this but do it with their unmanaged plans where you have to have professional expertise to manage. Even if you do have the skill to do this yourself, it’s simply better to leave this to your host, especially when you can get managed service at unmanaged prices like this.

You don’t have to worry about when you need to increase your resources, thinking this might take some real time, as DreamHost allows you to execute hardware upgrades in just 10 seconds.

DreamHost VPS hosting also offers a 100% uptime guarantee, and while you might think that 99% might be good enough, 1% of the time adds up to a lot of downtime that you can ill afford. DreamHost VPS also goes with 100% SSD drives, far faster than standard ones, and you basically get put on a state of the art configured server that you are given ample space on.

DreamHost offers all you could need and want in VPS hosting, including taking advantage of their expert engineering and customer support. If you want your site to run like a dream, that’ exactly what DreamHost does, at a very reasonable price.

Disclosure: I make my living from commissions based on my recommendations and advice, learn more by reading this page.

What is Virtual Private Server Hosting?

Web hosting comes in three main sizes, small, medium, and large. The dirt-cheap shared hosting plans are the small ones, but can only handle smallish sized sites. The large size ones are the dedicated server hosts, where you get your very own server and select from the best options out there.

All hosting is done on servers, with the shared ones housing a great number of clients, and what you are really sharing is the cost of the server, as well as its bandwidth. On the other end of the scale, with your own server you don’t have to share anything with anyone, including the cost.

With shared hosting, all users share the same resources, for example system memory. Depending on what is happening with the other users, this can cause your available resources to run very thin, and this is what you want or can afford to happen if your site is more than just a mom and pop one.

Virtual private server hosting uses virtualization to create a virtual server of your own, while still sharing the same physical server with other users. Users are allocated physical resources such as memory and it’s all yours, no one else can touch it, and use this to create servers within a server, virtual ones within a physical one.

If your needs are on the level where shared hosting does not cut it but you don’t quite need the ultimate setup of your own server, VPS hosting allows you to achieve all the performance you need while significantly reducing your costs. This works like a luxury condominium setup, where you get a great apartment but share the costs of maintaining the building with your neighbors.

You can even work your way up to the entry level dedicated service plans in terms of resources and performance, and compared to some, even a little beyond their entry level plans, all the time enjoying the savings as well as being able to easily transition to your own dedicated server if and when you outgrow VPS.

Choosing the right hosting service always starts at matching one with your needs, and for those who the medium level of hosting isn’t too small or too large but just right, VPS hosting offer a fabulous way to get the superpower performance you need and want at significant savings.

Who Needs VPS Hosting?

There are a lot of sites that clearly could benefit from VPS hosting but for various reasons are stuck in a shared hosting plan. If you aren’t making money from your site or very little, not only may shared hosting be perfectly fine, it may not even make sense for you to choose anything else.

Once you make enough money to make the cost of VPS hosting worth considering, you are now in a position to be able to leverage the considerably more powerful setup that VPS offers. This isn’t a calculation we need to make per site, but among all of your sites if you have several. VPS hosting will super-charge all of your sites, and even if you are only making a little per site, you don’t need many of these to justify the little extra monthly cost of VPS and create considerably more additional profit overall than the difference in monthly cost.

VPS simply does everything better than shared hosting does. Being in a position to graduate to VPS means that you are running a real business and need to make proper business decisions, including upgrading your hosting when it is beneficial to do so.

Not being aware of the limitations that your sites may be under due to being underserved with your hosting plan is a real issue, and the internet is plenty competitive enough without placing yourself at a disadvantage by not being aware enough of your needs and by being penny wise and pound foolish.

The entry level point for VPS hosting is actually pretty close to the price point of shared hosting, and even if your site is modest enough that you may be perfectly fine at the moment with your shared hosting, given that you can get into the much higher echelon of VPS for as little as $10 a month, people can really help themselves grow their sites by stepping up to at least the entry point and see the greater performance VPS offers accelerate the growth of their sites.

All you really need to justify going with VPS over shared hosting is the expectation that your sites have at least enough potential that you can make sense of taking the next step by spending a few extra bucks per month to move up to a much more pro setup with performance to match. We’ll show you the best places to find this.

How to Choose a VPS Hosting Service

Choosing the right VPS hosting setup needs to start with selecting a short list of candidates among the larger set of hosting companies that offer this service. There is plenty enough to consider once you have narrowed down your choices to just a few, and trying to do this diligence with a lot of different hosts would be pretty daunting, and may have you end up paying too much, not getting the quality of service you need and desire, or both.

Getting value out of any hosting service is always relative, where a smaller site for instance may get the most value out of the cheapest plans out there, but this plan may grossly underserve another site with more considerable needs. The better we understand what our needs are, the more likely we are to achieve the value with whatever plan we end up choosing.

There are two major ways of measuring potential value in hosting, the macro view and the micro view. We need to start at the macro level, the level of competitiveness that a hosting company offers, in other words, what sort of bang for the buck they offer across all their offerings.

This even includes how well they do not only with their VPS hosting, but with the quality of their higher-level dedicated server plans as well. VPS hosting and dedicated service hosting are to a large degree integrated, as the best ones offer you similar levels of service with the big difference being that you have part of a server all to yourself rather than the whole thing.

So you really want your hosting company to do both well, even if you do not ever expect to need the pricier dedicated server hosting, as a host being among the best in that area indicates that they are going to be among the best with VPS hosting as well. All of our top 3 recommendations for VPS hosts are also in the top 3 for dedicated server hosting, and this is indeed meaningful.

By our shortlisting this for you and only going with the very best, this covers you on all of the important things that a VPS hosting plan needs to have, leaving you only with deciding which one of these top hosts fits your particular needs the best, as well as which of their various plans suits you the best.

How We Rank VPS Hosting Companies

We always start at looking at the quality of the hosting companies themselves, and this always needs to the place you want to start. Reliability plays a central role in web hosting and if the company isn’t reliable enough, you can be less confident about how reliable what they offer may be.

While experience does indeed matter here, it’s more the experiences of their users that tell the real tale of a hosting company’s reputation. Aside from our analyzing the merit of the companies themselves, we place a lot of weight on what their users think of them, as this is where the rubber meets the road.

This is more than what people think that a company does well, and as important as this is, it’s even more important to look at where people see a company not living up to their expectations. We especially do not want to be setting people up for disappointment, and there Is any kind of consensus of a company failing to deliver on what they lead us to believe they will be providing us, that’s a genuine red flag.

We also look at the positive comments as well, especially with those who have had the chance to try out the services of multiple providers, to get a sense of how they see providers compare. That’s just the start of things though, but this does provide some valuable information to go along with our own analysis.

Many users may be happy enough with a service and not be all that aware of the potential having a better hosting plan may offer them and their sites. They also may not be fully aware of how they may not only be able to increase their performance in a meaningful way, as well as the potential to achieve the same or better at a better price point, which Is why value for the money is such a priority for us.

Among the things that Betterhost.com considers in coming up with our top recommendations are not only the quality of a hosting company, but how well they succeed in delivering their customers the things they want and need. This includes things like speed, bandwidth, reliability, flexibility, engineering, support, and cost effectiveness.

We put a lot of work into this and are happy to share our expert and unbiased recommendations with you and all of our readers.

Pros and Cons of Virtual Private Server Hosting

Like with other types of web hosting, the degree to whether VPS offers pros for you depends entirely on what your needs are. VPS is perfect for a whole lot of sites actually, and a lot of sites sell themselves well short by clinging to a shared hosting plan beyond, and often well beyond its usefulness.

This sort of mistake not only costs you money, it costs you in terms of the overall growth of your sites as well. If we take two similar sites, one using a hosting plan that no longer allows their sites to grow and flourish and another who upgraded to VPS hosting some time back, the VPS sites won’t just perform better now, they will also significantly outpace their weaker competitor and end up being much bigger over time.

Both visitors and search engines love all that extra speed, bandwidth, and overall performance that VPS hosting offers, but search engines particularly love this, and particularly dislike bottlenecks and poor performance generally. Unlike humans, they can perceive things like differences in speed at the micro level, and will give sites a big markdown if they are lagging, even if we cannot even perceive it.

In comparison to shared hosting, the place sites come from when they enter the world of VPS hosting, VPS simply does everything bigger and better. Even just between the best shared hosting plans and the entry level VPS plans, there is a big difference in performance with only a very modest increase in price.

On the con side, for smaller sites that do not require a more robust hosting plan due to being small enough for shared hosting to meet their needs fully, paying even a little more for something they don’t really need may not be such a great way to spend your money.

On the flip side, you don’t want to be lingering with a VPS plan when you start to come close to outgrowing it, when you have ramped up your sites with the additional power of VPS hosting to the point where it makes more sense to pay the extra for dedicated hosting, VPS would no longer be right for you.

Hosting is always about the right fit, but VPS happens to fit a great many sites and clients very well indeed, and with the right choice of options, perfectly.

Pros:

Top tier performance for a bargain price

Allows users to significantly enhance their site performance

Professional level engineering and support

Not having other users degrade their performance

Enhanced security, reliability, and support

Tremendous value for the money

Cons:

Too much power for the smallest of sites

Not quite as powerful as dedicated server plans if you need even more power

Summary of VPS Hosting

VPS hosting is the middle point between shared hosting and dedicated server hosting plans. It is much closer to the top than the bottom though, and shares a lot of things with its bigger brother, while leaving their smaller brothers in the dust.

Virtual private servers offer the private server space that dedicated servers do, and use software solutions to partition part of a powerful server, which is all yours. They allow users to be confident that the resource that they need and have chosen to serve their hosting needs will not be downgraded by the other sites on the server, avoiding the problem of having other sites hog the limited resources of a shared server and leaving you with the headaches and the loss of traffic and revenue that this causes.

While you do share VPS servers with other sites, with VPS, you book an appropriate set of resources such as RAM, processing speed, and storage capacity, which is never shared with anyone and you are therefore guaranteed that the capability you need will be there for you full time. This not only provides a lot better performance, it also helps you manage your ongoing needs as your sites grow and allow for you to tweak your hosting to exactly what you want and need at any point in time.

The market for VPS is actually a lot bigger in theory than in practice, with all those sites that should be moving up to it not being aware of this need. If you host serious sites, you need to make sure that your hosting plan is serious enough as well. VPS hosting offers a very affordable solution to mid sized sites that want to get out of the mud and propel themselves toward better achieving their short and long term goals.

Betterhost.com is more than happy to offer you our unbiased top level recommendations for the best VPS hosting out there. Feel free to check them out and then decide which of our top picks fits your needs the best.

FAQ About VPS Hosting

What is VPS hosting?

Virtual private server hosting, or VPS hosting, sections off areas on physical servers, and use software make it just like you have your own private server, with your own dedicated resources and software, at a fraction of the cost of dedicated servers.

How does VPS differ from shared hosting?

Shared hosting hosts a number of sites on each of their servers, where there are very limited resources per site hosted on it. Sites compete for these resources which can have you with some very limited ones. VPS hosting offers you a completely unshared space.

What are the advantages of having your own server space?

Having your own separate server space versus being on a shared server is like having your own hotel room versus staying in an emergency shelter. The shelter is crowded, and there’s only so much stuff to go around. In the hotel, you get plenty of your own stuff.

How does VPS hosting measure up to dedicated server hosting?

If VPS is a hotel room, dedicated server hosting would be luxury suites, which are bigger and offer the highest level of service. VPS offers very nice hotel rooms though and provide everything you need unless you have very big sites that need a suite instead, with a price to match.

What are the considerations for choosing a great VPS hosting plan?

It is not enough to simply select a VPS hosting plan that fits your budget like you would do with a lot of purchases. This is more of a matter of choosing one that best fits your needs, both now and in the near future. Only then do you consider value, after you determine fit.

What makes a great VPS hosting company?

Most industries have companies that really stand out from the rest, who take care of the needs of their customers very well as well as providing them with great value. BetterHost.com makes this completely easy for you with our top recommendations for VPS hosting.