Almost every small business owner or website developer who opts for a free VPS usually has significant traffic or cannot afford sluggish performance or downtime. And we all know how slow website load times can affect any business.
A virtual private server – VPS for short – is a dedicated virtual machine that hosting providers rent out as a service to their customers. It is completely isolated and functions independently.
It is technically a better choice than shared hosting.
With it, you have complete freedom and autonomy to separately host your site, customize your web properties as you want, install all the software you need, and optimize your website for speed and efficiency.
With all VPS’s advantages over shared hosting, it isn’t surprising that it demands a higher monthly investment. And with premium VPS hosting pegged at $30 to $55 monthly, it is usually a steep cost for small businesses.
Thankfully, many hosting companies also provide free VPS hosting. Using a free VPS will, of course, have its limitations when compared to the paid VPS options.
Still, it is an excellent way to get your feet wet and gauge a VPS’s performance before deciding for or against committing fully to it.
Why Premium VPS Hosting?
Buying premium VPS hosting instead of a free VPS is always better to maintain the best performance of your website or application.
Most of the premium cloud VPS providers offer free credits initially that you can try to get the most out of it.
Once your projects start making money, you can always pay for the hosting.
In UpCloud, you will get 25$ free hosting credits when you top up with $10. So, it is 7 months of premium cloud VPS hosting for 10$ when you deploy a 5$/mo server.
Alternatively, you can compare the best cloud VPS providers below and make your choice.
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** Updated on May 25, 2021
Top FREE VPS Hosting Companies to start a website right away
Most of the VPS options we’ve collected here provide free VPS hosting worth the time of day for small business owners and entrepreneurs in 2023.
There are also a few “almost free” options that are more than make up for their lack of a completely free VPS package.
Note: I recommend you to use such free hosting plans for testing or template sites only. If you really want to start an actual project, you should consider a good VPS plan or maybe a managed WordPress hosting package for your website.
This free cloud server has a reputation and longevity right off the bat. x10Hosting has been around for well over ten years and is still thriving. It is a free Linux VSP that offers one IP address and works with 512 MB RAM.
As expected, this being a free VPS server, x10Hosting’s offering does not offer some of the highest control and performance functionalities, which will be missed by more experienced users.
However, you will get access to a user-friendly website builder and single-click installation for web software with this package.
Thanks to its Single Hop architecture, this hosting service is designed for blazing speed and simplicity of use. x10Hosting’s free VPS option offers unlimited storage and bandwidth. It also has cPanel incorporation, PHP, and MySQL presence.
Thanks to its 100% cloud SSD servers, it is impressively stable and serves its users over 12 million web pages monthly while hosting more than 122 million in the same time frame.
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VPSWALA
Whether you’re of the “free Linux VPS” or the “free VPS Windows” persuasion, this free VPS is compatible with either kind of user. Established in 2013, VPSWALA has not been around for long.
This hosting company provides hosting to thousands of customer websites from 15 data centers worldwide.
Unlike some other free VPS services, VPSWALA offers root access and a fully custom control panel. From here, users can turn on, off, and reboot their servers, uninstall and reinstall different OS and software scripts, and have access to the server’s performance stats.
This VPS utilizes a 30 GB SSD hardware from Intel for storage. It also provides 2 CPU cores, 1TB bandwidth, 2GB of RAM, and one IP address. With this VPS, you also get one free domain and free SSL.
VSPWALA’s excellent 24/7 support, reliability, and dependence on KVM and Stack and its promise not to ever oversell their virtual machines make it attractive to students, web developers, and small business owners.
If A2 offers an anytime money-back guarantee, then InMotion’s 90-day money-back guarantee is the next best thing. They offer a managed VPS hosting solution that claims to be 20 times more powerful than what you get with shared hosting.
Specifications include a 4GB RAM, 4TB bandwidth, 75GB worth of storage, 46 unlocked CPU cores, cPanel compatibility, and WHM.
InMotion’s VPS is suitable for hosting several massive projects simultaneously. It won’t matter whether you’re running an e-commerce business, relatively lighter projects like professional writing review services such as PickTheWriter and Writing Judge, or a full-featured digital marketing website like CopyBlogger.
If you’re unsure whether InMotion’s managed VPS can handle your website, you have a 3-month window to test it out at no cost.
This hosting company offers a wide array of hosting options across three categories: shared hosting, reseller hosting, and VPS hosting.
It does have a free VPS hosting option, but some of its features are not as great as many prospective website owners would want.
These subpar features are immediately evident in its 256MB RAM allocation and 5GB SSD storage. This VPS package also has one CPU core, a 50GB bandwidth, and each IPv4 and IPv6 address.
They also warn that they provide no kind of customer support or server management besides, except for network or server outage issues.
The company tries to offset its allocation shortcomings with a 99% uptime guarantee, DDoS protection, and cPanel incorporation.
The only way to join Instafree is first to join their forums and then submit an application that will be reviewed in 48 hours at the most. They also have a list of forbidden countries, so check that out before applying for their free VPS.
This hosting company provides a straightforward and robust way to try out their hosting via a free cloud VPS option. ALA VPS’s free cloud VPS hosting plan comes with 1 CPU core, 100% redundancy, 1GB of RAM, an impressive 300GB bandwidth, and more.
ALA VPS claims that you can set up their free cloud VPS from your desktop or phone in as little as 60 seconds. Also, they promise reliable round-the-clock support, 100 uptime, weekly backups, DDoS protection, and more.
Upon sign up, the company does not request your card details or any other payment information, a trait that helps them look more trustworthy.
Another Linux-powered VPS, Giga Rocket’s approval model for their free VPS service, is unique. They only approve of people who join their community forums and contribute meaningfully. You must have made at least 25 posts in the forums to even be considered.
Upon approval, you will also have to maintain a minimum of 15 posts per month to keep access to the free VPS.
Giga Rocket offers one CPU core, 1GB RAM, and 150GB bandwidth. Sadly, they offer a relatively subpar 25GB HDD storage (most of their competitors use SSD storage).
However, they provide full root SSH access and more than a few Linux OS options: Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, and more.
Amazon’s VPS offering is one of the most significant enterprises hosting niche. This VPS isn’t just poised to cater to any type of operating system and web application. Thanks to the accompanying video tutorials, it is also designed to teach VPS newbies how to use their robust system.
This free VPS comes with many “forever free” features, 750 hours of use monthly, 5GB of storage, robust control panel, management tools, and no credit card requirement, among other things.
Amazon Web Services is free forever, but there’s a catch. After your first free 12 months, many features become unavailable to you.
Unfortunately, one of the things you lose after the first year is your virtual machine, so if you want a VPS, you may need to upgrade or find an alternative to AWS.
The free VPS from this hosting company isn’t a plan; it’s a 30-day trial period of their VPS. Still, its features make it worth the trouble.
AccuWebHosting‘s free VPS is Windows-powered, which is a relative rarity in the Linux-dominated world of VPS hosting.
This free VPS solution comes with 1 GB RAM, 35 GB storage, a bandwidth of 500 GB, 2 CPU cores, and 1 IP address. The initial virtual machine setup carries all the needed applications such as MySQL, MailEnable, ASP.Net Frameworks, Microsoft SQL, etc.
You must note that signing up for AccuWebHosting VPS can only be done with a business email. No credit card is required to sign up, and all applications are manually reviewed and set up within 24 to 48 hours.
WoomHost has a free VPS hosting plan for each of its hosting categories. Their VPS hosting has a robust package for both Linux servers and Windows users. The Linux VPS Server comes with 2GB RAM, 2 CPU cores, 1.5TB bandwidth, and 120GB of storage.
The Windows variant edges the Linux with 4GB of RAM, 165 GB of storage, and 2TB bandwidth. Both options carry one free domain name and live chat support.
This sounds like a reliable option for small businesses and entrepreneurs looking to test out VPS performance.
However, while WoomHost has garnered many excellent reviews on sites like Trust Pilot, we did uncover an inconsistency with their listed address, so you should tread with caution.
Also Read:
- [Updated] Best Shared Web Hosting Companies of 2023
- Best Cloud Hosting Companies: Unmanaged Developer-friendly servers: Switch from Shared to Cloud for more speed and reliability.
Final Words
The fact is that excellent free VPS services are hard to find, and even many of the good ones need to be watched continuously.
Still, they remain a good option for regular users, beginner software developers and app builders, and small businesses and entrepreneurs on the lookout for the ideal online presence.
In the end, free VPS hosting cannot be a permanent solution to your VPS needs, so treat it as a trial run at best. And when you find the service that best suits your needs, it’s time to start thinking about scaling.
