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 November 16 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?

 

Edited November 17 by modifiedcontent

[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!

[Krlos]

I highly recommend KnownHost.com. I have a fully managed VPS with them, and in seven years, I’ve had zero issues.

[modifiedcontent]

Thanks @Krlosand @ErikMH! 

I'm almost certainly going with a Vultr Cloud Compute instance. Any arguments against Vultr? Anyone had bad experiences with them? Are there Vultr alternatives that are similar but better? Or strong arguments to use a fully managed VPS instead?

What Linux version would you recommend? Debian or AlmaLinux or Alpine Linux or Ubuntu or ... etc. ? Does it make any difference? Does Processwire work better with one or the other?

 

Edited November 17 by modifiedcontent

[joe_g]

i use hetzner for everything since some years

[FireWire]

I've used DigitalOcean for years and the experience has been great, but little less over time. Ever since they went public with their IPO they've raised their prices noticeably and it feels like there are a bunch of upcharges for things that should be included. As a word of warning to anyone stumbling across this post, don't even bother with their managed databases. Terrible performance with high latency that really slows down applications. Not surprised that @ErikMH tests of DO vs others showed lag. I'm going to take a look at Vultr for my next move, the pricing looks good, like DO used to be.

@modifiedcontent The flavor of Linux you choose will have less of an impact than the hardware. I tend to go with Ubuntu on servers because everything is easily available through apt repositories and it has wide support. You could say the same for Debian, but I go with Ubuntu since they offer Expanded Security Maintenance and Livepatch services. Knowing that there's automatic updates to the server is nice. Combine that with configuring unattended-upgrades and it's a good way to keep things up to date. When you read the information on their site about these services, the language targets the enterprise, however when you create an account you can get these services for free for a limited number of machines. I've run ProcessWire on both Ubuntu and Alpine and didn't notice a difference other than Alpine was a little more bare bones.

As long as the server can handle PHP and a database, ProcessWire won't know the difference. You're better off focusing on optimizing PHP-FPM workers and taking advantage of the strong PHP features like OPcache, adding the ModPageSpeed module, and JIT compiling (if it suits your use case). If you choose to explore using ModPageSpeed that will be an easy add and configuration on Ubuntu, Alpine will require a Docker container and extra work.

As for a recommendation on hardware, NVMe drives will likely have the most impact on performance, followed by the processor. Depending on how much you expect your server to handle, they're worth the few extra bucks if it's in your budget. I've switched between the basic VPS and a VPS with an upgraded drive and CPU and the difference was noticeable in how fast the PW admin runs. ProCache content is also delivered faster via NVMe.

I saw some benchmarks that were performed on a DO droplet and AMD beat out Intel easily on performance. Not sure if that translates to other cloud providers, but given what we've seen with Intel and their chip shenanigans in the past year, I'm all AMD these days.

Not sure of how you prefer or plan to manage the server itself, but if you want a recommendation for a control panel, I've recently had a great experience with Virtualmin. It has a lot of UI control for some granular items that you would expect to manage from the CLI. I've managed VPSs via both, and have long preferred managing everything via bare SSH and bash but Virtualmin offers pretty much everything you need in a gui, and is great on performance. It also makes managing resources much easier than CLI, like how much RAM is dedicated to the database process (if you choose to run your DB on the same server), which makes it great for running lean on lower spec servers.

I did just migrate to Virtualmin + bare Ubuntu from OpenLiteSpeed + CyberPanel within the last month. OLS has some attractive features out of the box, like native support for HTTP3 which provides excellent speed on TTFB, but it comes with tradeoffs and locks a lot of things behind an upgrade package that is hard to justify in cost. OLS locks you to one worker process unless you purchase a very expensive enterprise upgrade. I use ProCache to deliver content where possible but there are times when you can't, and the PW admin can run noticeably slow. The HTTP3 and extra layer of built-in caching are eclipsed by less than stellar performance everywhere else.

I added some extras here that nobody asked for, but if anyone else has some experiences they can share I'm interested in hearing more from the community as well.

 

[modifiedcontent]

Thanks for the excellent info @FireWire!

Is Virtualmin free? Or should I still get a license if I want to use my websites professionally, like with cPanel I guess? How do Webmin, Vesta, Plesk and others stack up? What is the best open source and free option?

Vultr apparently offers Plesk as option during the setup process - haven't tried that yet...

[FireWire]

@modifiedcontent Virtualmin is open source and has a free community version. You can host multiple sites and have multiple users. Unless you're running a serious enterprise multi-server hosting business, I think Virtualmin would suit you just fine. What constitutes "use my websites professionally" more has to do with the features you expect to need. Virtualmin has an easy and clear breakdown of whether you're a person who actually needs a professional license at all, and "best" is very subjective. Personal preference, I've never liked cPanel but it's popular so some people think it's the best for them.

I'm not an expert in server management software, but from what I've used I like Virtualmin the best. A downside for a more casual user is that the main admin (the one that manages users and has total control of the server) has a lot of features and may involve a little bit of a learning curve. It's likely not something you can't handle, but you have much more granular control over the server and users.

I may have used Plesk in the past, probably through some managed hosting provider but it's not memorable enough to have an opinion. Given that the software you do choose is going to manage your server for the long term and there are open source/free versions, it's worth spending an afternoon trying them out. Spin up a cheap VPS, install the software, play around with it, then destroy the instance and review your notes. I've never been satisfied by just comparing specs or features "on paper" so to speak when it comes to server management software. It's something you have to feel out.

Honestly- spending some time and getting a feel for the software is time well spent. You can be confident that the hours you spend up front now will ensure that you don't need to spend way, way, way more time later migrating all of your sites later because you find you can't live with it.

Vultr has a marketplace that you can select an image to spin up a VPS with both cPanel and Plesk. It doesn't include Virtualmin or Vesta but those are essentially single line bash command installs. Just remember that if you're going to install Virtualmin, spin up a blank server with Linux and without any web hosting applications like Apache or MySQL- Virtualmin will take care of all of that.

[Sten]

Have a look at Contabo, I am very satisfied and they are cheap.