When comparing web hosting services, most Australian companies consider either cheaper shared hosting plans or more robust, costly dedicated hosting packages. A virtual private server (VPS) hosting plan falls between these two options. VPS plans typically allow for more bandwidth than shared hosting plans without requiring users to pay for an entire physical server as with a dedicated hosting plan.
VPS hosting services offer a balance of both flexibility and affordability that might be a good fit for your business. The best VPS hosting services offer managed and unmanaged plans with generous storage, RAM and bandwidth. We analysed all the industry’s top VPS plans.
As you will see, there are a range of prices among hosting providers, with some aiming for budget-conscious businesses and others pricing their services much higher. As with anything, you get what you pay for with VPS Hosting, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t deals out there.
Here’s who made the cut.
Note: The below list represents a selection of our top category picks, as chosen by Forbes Advisor Australia’s editors and journalists. The information provided is purely factual and is not intended to imply any recommendation, opinion, or advice about a financial product. Not every product or provider in the marketplace has been reviewed, and the list below is not intended to be exhaustive nor replace your own research or independent financial advice. For more information on how Forbes Advisor ranks and reviews products, including how we identified our top category picks, read the methodology selection below.
Related: Best Web Hosting for Australians
Featured Partners
1
Bluehost
VPS Starting Price
$US31.99 ($48.42 AUD)
Storage and Bandwidth
120 GB (SSD), unmetered
RAM
2 GB
2
HostGator
Starting price
$US3.75 ($5.62 AUD) per month
Storage and Bandwidth
Unmetered
Extras and inclusions
Free domain registration for a year, free website and domain transfer, free SSL certificate, free email
3
IONOS
VPS Starting Price
$US2 ($3 AUD)
Storage and Bandwidth
10 GB, unmetered (entry-level plan)
RAM
1 GB
The Forbes Advisor Small Business team is committed to bringing you unbiased rankings and information with full editorial independence. We use product data, strategic methodologies and expert insights to inform all of our content and guide you in making the best decisions for your business journey.
We reviewed 14 hosting services using a detailed methodology to help you find the best VPS hosting services for Australian small businesses. Our ratings consider 24 criteria related to pricing, the types of features available, how real users of the hosting services viewed them and a roundup of key points around ease of use and value for the money by our panel of experts. Our Australian-based editorial team applied an additional layer of research to ensure relevance for local customers. All ratings are determined solely by our editorial team.
VPS hosting is an upgrade from shared hosting. With a shared hosting plan, your website lives on a server with many other websites. It’s an effective solution for small and new websites that don’t require a lot of resources for files or high traffic. On a VPS plan, you still share space with others, but you aren’t sharing resources—you have your own RAM, storage and CPU power.
Your VPS is a virtual space with dedicated resources on a single physical server. That’s why you’ll see options for more CPU cores, RAM and storage. However, you’re still limited to the constraints of that physical server. If you need more than the highest plan offered by a VPS host, you may need to consider cloud hosting or a dedicated server. You can read more about cloud hosting in our guide to some of the best on the market for Australians.
When your site grows after years of content, ranking higher in search engines and more visitors, you may need to move up to a VPS. If shared hosting is like living in a commune where you share food and space, a VPS is like having your own home in a neighbourhood (and you don’t have to share your food).
If you’re getting more resources via a VPS server, it stands to reason you get faster page loading and better performance. You also pay a higher price. Some of the benefits of a VPS server are less obvious, though.
The best VPS host for you will depend on your unique hosting needs and budget. For example, if you need to host a large amount of data, then you will want to look at hosting plans that offer generous amounts of storage at a solid value. But if site performance is a top priority, you might want to invest in premium plans that offer dedicated CPU cores and RAM.
Consider the features you need to effectively run your site or sites. The best VPS hosting providers offer a lot of choice:
Most hosting companies offer 99% or higher uptime promises and guarantees. You should expect your server to be down occasionally because web hosts need to update hardware and software. Generally, they have redundancies and backups so you don’t lose data and you don’t suffer too much downtime.
There’s a big difference between 99% uptime and 99.9% uptime. Here’s what the difference between uptime guarantees can look like in terms of minutes down:
99% uptime = ~14 minutes downtime per day (3 days, 14 hours per year)
99.5% uptime = ~7 minutes downtime per day (1 day, 19 hours per year)
99.9% uptime = ~1.5 minutes downtime per day (9.5 hours per year)
As you can see, even half a percent can make a huge difference in how much time servers are down. Keep in mind that an uptime guarantee simply guarantees that you won’t have more downtime than what’s expected. If you do, a web host usually gives you a prorated credit for the time your site or VPS was down.
Having 24/7 support from your web host is always important because you never know when you may need tech help. That help may not always be related to downtime either. If you’re new to managing your own server, you may have questions. Look for hosting providers that offer round-the-clock support for live chat and phone (or at least one or the other), email and knowledge bases.
Managed VPS hosting is a great option for anyone who doesn’t consider themselves to be tech-savvy. If you’re moving from shared hosting to VPS for the first time, it’s a good idea to start with a managed VPS plan because you won’t have to do much. The hosting company’s tech team will take care of the maintenance of your server, including security patches and updates.
Unmanaged hosting is ideal for developers who know their way around a server. You have root access and therefore complete control over your operating system, setup, control panel, security patches and updates to apps. Of course, this means you need to pay close attention to your server’s maintenance. Because of the hands-on nature, most unmanaged VPS plans are less expensive.
A dedicated server is more expensive, but you get the entire server to yourself. It’s a bump up from a VPS because you don’t share resources with others. A dedicated server for your site results in faster loading speeds, more resources to handle more files or content, and a flood of traffic.
Most Australian small businesses won’t need a dedicated server right away, but there are a few caveats. One of the best ways to judge whether you need to upgrade to a dedicated server is to look at your traffic from your busiest days, such as holiday sales days. If your site was sluggish on those days and you had spikes in traffic, it might be time to consider upgrading to a dedicated server.
In addition to having all the server’s resources to yourself, you’re likely to get dedicated support, complete control over your server’s configuration and there’s no threat of malware or spam bringing your server down from another user’s actions.
Featured Partners
1
Bluehost
VPS Starting Price
$US31.99 ($48.42 AUD)
Storage and Bandwidth
120 GB (SSD), unmetered
RAM
2 GB
2
HostGator
Starting price
$US3.75 ($5.62 AUD) per month
Storage and Bandwidth
Unmetered
Extras and inclusions
Free domain registration for a year, free website and domain transfer, free SSL certificate, free email
3
IONOS
VPS Starting Price
$US2 ($3 AUD)
Storage and Bandwidth
10 GB, unmetered (entry-level plan)
RAM
1 GB
Most VPS hosting companies follow the same pricing structure: monthly or annual plans. Some offer three-month, six-month or multiple-year plan options. And the cost for VPS usually ranges from $10 AUD to $75 AUD per month at regular price; on the low end, you can find hosting plans for $3 AUD per month or as high as $100 AUD per month.
For the bargain-bin pricing, such as $3 AUD per month, you typically pay upfront for an entire year or multiple years of service. Higher-priced options may be paid on a month-to-month basis and require no long-term contracts. And the low-tier or basic plans have low resources in common.
Basic plans limit your resources significantly, though you still get more than shared hosting users. You’re likely to see around 1 GB of RAM and 10 GB to 30 GB of storage. Processing power is also fairly limited: it’s rare to see an entry-level plan offer more than one CPU core. If bandwidth is measured, you may get around 1 TB before seeing your site slow.
Upgrading to an advanced plan gives you far more room to grow your site or sites. Top-tier plans can offer up to 16 CPU cores, upwards of 500 GB of storage and 30 GB of RAM. And the more you pay, the higher your transfer allowance goes, too—we’ve seen some as high as 32 TB of bandwidth.
To save the most money on VPS hosting, choose an annual plan or pay for multiple years in advance. You can start with a low-tier plan and upgrade as needed, but the benefit of paying a lot now is that you typically save 25% to 50% (and even more sometimes) off the regular price.
As you shop for the best VPS hosting service, you may come across other types of hosting and wonder if they might be better. In some cases, they may be; it depends on your needs, budget and tech stack (and tech skill).
In addition to VPS, these are some common hosting types you may want to consider:
There are specific criteria you have to consider when choosing the best VPS hosting services for your needs. We started by analysing 14 hosting companies for our comparison. We then scored them across 24 criteria, giving considerable weight to virtual private server-specific features such as the number of resources each company allotted for entry-level plans, the starting price and whether they offer both managed and unmanaged VPS options.
Here are some of the categories that we used to rank the providers that made our list.
The starting price for VPS hosting needed to be affordable for a provider to fare well in our rankings. Those with an entry-level price of $10 AUD per month or lower fared the best. However, some providers either feature short introductory offers or major price increases once the introductory offer comes to an end, so those that had low to no price increases upon contract renewal received high marks. Other pricing factors we considered included how many sites were covered in a VPS hosting plan and how long of a money-back guarantee a provider offered. Pricing amounted to 40% of the total score.
We considered the basic features you should expect of any web hosting company, including helpful support, uptime guarantees, lower annual pricing and customer reviews. Of course, everyone’s needs are different, so be sure to research the unique features, pricing, refunds and resource allowances to determine which VPS host is best for you. Other features we considered include unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, cPanel and SSL certificate availability and if a free domain name was available. Additionally, we considered whether these items came with the service as part of the monthly fee or as an add-on. Unique features, such as free business email, automatic backup scheduling and content delivery network, also counted in our rankings. We weighted features at 20% of our final score.
Turning to popular third-party review websites such as Capterra and Trustpilot, we gauged real users’ experiences with the VPS hosting services. This included looking at the total number of positive reviews the providers had on each website and how many of those reviews were on the high end of the spectrum (at least 3.5 out of 5). Customer opinion accounted for 20% of the total score.
Based on the categories listed above and our Australian market research, we also ranked additional criteria from customer reviews that included popularity, value for the money, stand-out features and ease of use to come up with our final tally. These criteria made up 20% of the total score.
You will note that we have included a star rating next to each product or provider. This rating was determined by the editorial team once all of the data points above were considered, and the pros and cons of each product attribute was reviewed. The star rating is solely the view of Forbes Advisor editorial staff. Commercial partners or advertisers have no bearing on the star rating or their inclusion on this list. Star ratings are only one factor to be considered, and Forbes Advisor encourages you to seek independent advice from an authorised financial adviser in relation to your own financial circumstances a
Additional research by Anna Rey
Forbes Advisor named IONOS the best overall VPS host because of its affordable plans, 24/7 support and 99.99% uptime guarantee. Our other top picks include GoDaddy and DreamHost.
As your business grows and your site traffic increases, you may need to consider upgrading from a shared server to a VPS. It may also be necessary to opt for a VPS if you have plans to build a more complex website that shared hosting can’t support.
A VPS plan comes with a portion of resources dedicated to your sites alone, so you pay for that exclusivity. A managed VPS plan often costs more because tech support is also dedicated to your virtual space, whereas an unmanaged plan is more affordable because the technical details are your responsibility. If VPS hosting servers are too expensive for you right now, consider the best cheap web hosting services.
Technically, you can host as many websites as you’d like on a VPS. The only limitation that should exist with your VPS is your total allotment of resources.
VPS hosting services offer the same type of security measures that you would find with other types of hosting services. This includes measures such as firewalls, backup software, DDoS attack protection, server hardening and frequent scanning for vulnerabilities, as well as constant updates and patches made to the software.
Managed VPS hosting is similar to shared hosting in that the provider offers help with the configuration and maintenance of your VPS. Setup, security and updates can all be handled by your host. It’s also a slightly more expensive option than unmanaged hosting.
Shared hosting splits resources on a single server among many users while VPS hosting creates virtual server space with dedicated resources for each user. Usually, a VPS carries fewer users, so there’s less strain on the physical server.
The biggest difference between VPS and cloud hosting is that a VPS is set up on a single physical server while cloud servers are set up on multiple networked physical servers. On a cloud server, you can increase or decrease your resources as needed.
