Best Free VPS Hosting (UK)

The worst thing that can happen is renting a server that’s never online. The best VPS hosts will give you an uptime guarantee, which means they promise your server will not go offline (taking your content with it).

Best Uptime Guarantees

The better the company you're dealing with, the better their infrastructure and ability to offer you better uptime guarantees.

At a minimum, we recommend 99.95% uptime guarantees as a baseline - anything less than this will cause your business to suffer when visitors search for your content and cannot access it (that's lost sales and lost trust). 

Should You Get a Managed or Unmanaged VPS?

This is another thing to consider. When you go for a managed VPS plan, this means the hosting company takes care of much more of the day-to-day running. You don't have as much ability to customize managed servers, such as with performance patches, data backups, security updates, and so on.

By comparison, a non-managed VPS hands much more of the control of the server over to you. You directly take care of many of the technical aspects, as the site owner - that includes how the server and the operating system are configured.

If you don't know much about the technical side of running a server, this could be a lot of time and headaches on your part (you already have a business to run), and we would recommend you hire somebody who does have the technical knowledge - or to pay the extra for a managed plan.

Overall, a managed to VPS plan is best for somebody who does not have technical know-how with servers. However, if you do have that knowledge, an unmanaged VPS can save you some money as long as you have time to deal with the technical elements (it could be offered as a long-term add-on to client sites, for developers out there with a team). 

Best Hardware

You want to give the server hardware some thought as well, as it makes a difference. You will find two main hardware options. Firstly, you can rent out a virtual space using a physical server. This single physical server gives you excellent reliability and performance capacity with less starting costs.

The main drawback with using a physical VPS server, especially if it is a single server, is that if something goes wrong - due to another website eating up a lot of traffic - this might affect you (shared hosting also has this issue). 

Even worse, if a trojan gets into that server, potentially all of the connected websites will be affected, although VPS plans offer you more protection by far then shared plans do. VPS systems do this by creating a virtual mimic of a dedicated server, giving you extra protection from viruses.

NB. If you want maximal insulation from cybercriminals and hackers, which will be especially true for people who are storing sensitive data such as healthcare websites, cloud or dedicated hosting may be preferable.

Benefits of the Cloud by Comparison

Although cloud hosting has not been around for that long, it has made great gains due to some of the unique advantages it gives its users. For one, cloud hosting decentralizes your data, as it is powered by many servers often located in other parts of the country or even world.

You get data redundancy with this hosting type. It’s particularly useful when it comes to sidestepping traffic bottlenecks.

Data redundancy basically means that your information is duplicated across every server powering your website. If one server struggles to deal with the load, your website queries are automatically and instantly rebooted to other servers that are inactive.

This gives cloud hosting an extreme level of reliability. This data redundancy serves as extra insulation against the sorts of downtime disasters that can happen during the busy periods like Black Friday.

They also offer an immense level of scalability that can be immediately implemented. And usually charges are only made for the data bytes that you actually use. 

Dedicated vs VPS Hosting

So you’ve been at your blog for a while and it’s starting to get noticed. Every new post takes you a considerable amount of time, and making the graphics to support the content is no easy task either.

The hard work’s paying off. You’re getting a decent number of unique visits each time you publish a new post, and seeing yourself higher-up in the search engines than you previously were. You're worried that visitors may notice a performance drop, because there are more of them using your website.

What do you do? 

In truth, most bloggers out there go for a VPS. This typically gives you the best value for jumping up from a shared hosting type.

In either case, you get what you pay for with a dedicated or VPS plan. But dedicated would typically be recommended more for those who are dealing with a media-intensive website and lots of sales...

(speed is the killer factor with conversions)

VPS’s Offer More Pricing Variety

There’s more to choose from with VPS pricings compared to Dedicated hosting, and you can likely find your ideal tier, which is usually why most people go to a VPS.

You also have the option to get an managed or unmanaged plan with either choice.

Both options give you a lot of control over your server’s customisations.

Dedicated servers have the edge when it comes to the higher-end of performance (not your average blogger’s needs)...

You are also more insulated against distributed denial-of-service (DDOS attacks).

Because you will have your own server, when you are in a dedicated plan, you do not need to concern yourself with what your neighbors are up to at all.

VPS plans secure you virtually and also come with dedicated IP addresses, but it's a little less likely that you will have an intrusion if you go for a dedicated server (as long as you install the proper security measures, which will happen automatically if you get a managed plan). 

As we said at the start of the article, there are certain things you want to keep your eye out for as they give away which VPS providers are actually offering a decent service.

While at the start, we focused on things to avoid, such as forcing you to click on advertising. Now we want to focus on the kind of features you should look for as they will present you with the best kind of service, performance, and support for your VPS hosting.

Free Trials (Test it First )

Who doesn’t love a free trial? It costs nothing, you get to see how it works, and, if you’re smarter than we are, you’ll remember to cancel to automatic payment a month down the line if you don’t like it.

Free trials are a crucial thing to look for when taking up VPS hosting. They allow you to get a feel for the hosting service, a deeper understanding of how it works, an opportunity to see its strengths and weaknesses in action, and, most importantly, a chance to see if it’s right for your experience level.

I cannot stress this last point enough. If you’re a complete beginner, the last thing you want is to be paying for VPS hosting you have no idea how to use. This will make your development process a lot harder and grind your learning to a halt.

So look for a free trial and take the different VPS hosting services for a spin. Just remember to cancel the ones that aren’t right for you.

Customer Support

Great customer support on your hosting is invaluable.

Unless you’re the Yoda of web hosting, you’re almost guaranteed to come across bumps in the road that are beyond your ability to solve.

Website crashing. Getting hacked. Installing plugins. All of it.

Enter customer support.

A good customer support agent will be expertly trained to deal with your problem. This means no matter how confusing or impossible it might seem, they’ll be able to figure it out.

But here’s the best bit. A good customer support service is available 24/7, 365 days a year. This means no matter when you encounter your problem, you will be able to get help to solve it.

When looking for a good VPS hosting service you want to make sure it comes with great customer service. Look for reviews that indicate this to be the case, and make sure they offer year-round 24/7 service. Doing so will vastly increase the quality of your hosting and help you maintain your site year-round.

Dependability and Proof of Service

A good reputation is hard to win but easy to lose. This is especially true when it comes to web hosting.

If a VPS provider has a solid reputation for dependability, then it means they’ve put in the work and consistently delivered what their customers have wanted time and time again. This means they’ll do the same for you.

These are the kind of providers you want to look for, but additionally, you want to look for proof that they’ve provided great service to customers. Look for testimonials from reputable websites (especially if they’re in your niche) that indicate the hosting service has helped them get to where they are.

Discounts & Deals on VPS Purchases

Many VPS providers will offer sales and discounts on their hosting options. A good example of this is Black Friday sales or Hostinger’s Cyber Sale which can offer deals at discounts of up to 90%.

Buying VPS hosting during these periods can lead to massive savings in both the short and long term. As you’re likely going to be looking for hosting across a period of months of years, finding a good discount on an already cheap service can make your hosting bills as painless as possible.

If you combine that with a service that offers excellent features, hardware, performance, and customer service - then you’ll end up getting top quality hosting for next to nothing at all.

Automatic Backups, Added Security, Extra Features, and Freebies

If there’s one guarantee in the world of web hosting, it’s that something is going to go wrong, and problems are going to pop up like weeds.

This is normal.

It could be anything from your website crashing, to your hosting getting hacked, to you suddenly needing more functionality from your website in order to meet your creative / business needs.

When this happens, you want a VPS provider that helps you solve these problems as easily as possible. To do this you want to look for a provider that comes locked and loaded with a set of extra features that are going to help you handle these problems, or, even better, solve them before they occur.

Features like added security help to prevent or deter hacking, while automatic backups consistently keep your web content backed up in case your site crashes or gets corrupted by a bad update. This helps you get your content back online often at just the click of a button.

Many of these extra features will be free, but it will depend on the hosting package. Take time to understand what extra options are included and consider whether they’ll help you down the line.