Best VPS hosting provider for 2025?

[modifiedcontent]

I have had my websites etc. on Bluehost for over a decade, but they're now extorting me out of too much money from migration from CentOS - they should have fixed that a year ago as part of the service imho... - and trying to force me on bigger plans I don't need.

What are the best, most reliable value-for-money VPS hosting providers for a bunch of Processwire websites and email etc. for 2025? What are your experiences with the current hosting landscape? Any recommendations much appreciated. 

Edited 4 hours ago by modifiedcontent

[ErikMH]

I’ve had a great experience with Vultr, first as the data center for some sites I hosted via CloudWays, and more recently (since Cloudways was bought by D.O.) directly with Vultr.

I absolutely recommend their “Vultr Cloud Compute” (shared-CPU VPSs) — especially the “high performance” and “high frequency” offerings starting at $6/month. In fact, I’ve found the absolute base-level “high frequency” choice is more than adequate to host five small PW sites (single “wire” folder, multiple “site” folders):

1 vCPU (3GHz+ Intel Xeon), 1 GB RAM, 32 GB NVMe SSD, 1 TB bandwidth

They give you a choice of many OSs (including CentOS 9 and 10, though I use Debian 12) and many data centers worldwide.

For my niche sites with visitors from around the globe, I’ve found it practical to set up one server locally for development and data entry. Whenever I’m ready to push a code change or new postings/pages, I make a (nearly free) snapshot backup of the staging server, and restore it to a half-dozen strategically chosen server sites (at $6/each): Amsterdam, Seoul, Atlanta — you get the idea). I have set up Cloudflare to handle the load balancing geographically.

If the CPU and bandwidth are adequate but you need more drive space, they offer S3-compatible object storage or inexpensive regular block storage.

Or if you’re a high-traffic site you can of course up the RAM, CPU, bandwidth, and internal SSD specs.

The usual background applies: I have no affiliation with Vultr, I’ve just been happily hosting with them for three years.

I do recommend that you choose either “high frequency” (if speed and a little extra drive space are more important) or “high performance” (if you want more bandwidth and are willing to trade a little drive space and speed for it), rather than “regular performance,” which felt surprisingly slower to me when I set up parallel systems for comparison.

https://www.vultr.com/pricing/#cloud-compute/

https://www.vultr.com/features/datacenter-locations/

 

[modifiedcontent]

Excellent. Thanks, @ErikMH. I actually have tried Vultr for a small temp side project years ago, after positive impressions in research. They did not come up in my search for VPS hosts. I'll look into them again. 

Hostinger, A2 Hosting, SiteGround, Dreamhost, InMotion, IONOS, etc. often come up as Bluehost VPS alternatives. Are they? Any good? Which to avoid?

Anyone have experience with OVHcloud?

Other options under the radar?

 

[ErikMH]

I’m afraid I have no experience with any of the hosts you mention. In addition to my Vultr recommendation, I can offer the following info:

• Cloudways. They really grease the wheels for setups where pushing and pulling from or to staging and production environments is key. You have a choice of all (or most) of the data centers available from Vultr, linode, Digital Ocean, Amazon, and Google, and can mix and match. They were independent, based in Malta, but they’ve been bought by Digital Ocean.
  
  A little over two years ago, I tested the speed of a simple PW site on identically configured Cloudways hosts with Digital Ocean, Vultr, and linode backends in the same cities. (I couldn’t afford Amazon or Google.) Though all the sites behaved perfectly, the Vultr-backed site was far more responsive. D.O.’s sluggishness didn’t surprise me, but I’d have expected linode to have been more competitive. It was these Cloudways tests that led me naturally to Vultr when D.O. bought Cloudways.
   
• pair Networks. A shadow of their former self. Still only in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — though at one point theirs was one of the best-connected data centers in the world. They have not kept up with the times. I’m still hosting a couple of nearly abandoned sites with them; I guess I hate to pull the plug, since I’ve been a client for 27 years!
   
• Hetzner Online. Lots of offerings. GDPR compliant. Based in Germany (for better and for worse). The user interface looks like it was designed in 1999 and got a new coat of paint last year. I have one site with them, which I intend to move to Vultr — not because I’m particularly unhappy with them, but just to simplify.

Let us know what you decide!