2025 Vultr VPS Review: A Perfect Balance of Performance and Value, with New Breakthroughs from a Veteran Provider

I’ve been using Vultr VPS for almost five years now, so it’s definitely a veteran in the VPS hosting market. Over the years, they’ve expanded their product offerings significantly. Vultr is an unmanaged VPS hosting solution, which is great for those who want the performance of a VPS without paying the higher price of traditional shared hosting. One of Vultr’s big advantages is how easy it is to launch new server instances and add more resources to existing ones, even with this cloud VPS hosting. Plus, you get a lot of control over your website. On the flip side, if you’re not super tech-savvy, it’s still easy to get started.

Tip: Vultr offers new users a $300 credit that you can use to test their services. You can easily head to their official website through the button or link below to get started.

Latest Vultr VPS Review

Vultr has earned a strong following over the years, and I’m proud to be one of their loyal customers. All of their servers are built on KVM architecture and use SSD storage, with 16 data center locations worldwide, including in Asia, the Americas, and Europe. This makes Vultr one of the cloud hosting providers with the most node options available. In this review, we’ll also touch on whether Vultr is the best VPS for setting up a VPN.

When it comes to pricing, you’ll often see Vultr compared to other services like DigitalOcean. It’s worth noting that Vultr’s pricing starts as low as half the cost of DigitalOcean’s cheapest plan (with less bandwidth), beginning at just $5.

If you’re on a budget but still want solid performance, Vultr is the way to go. Most of their unmanaged hosts are excellent, and whichever one you choose, you can’t go wrong. But each option has its own unique benefits. Now, let’s take a closer look at what makes Vultr stand out, beyond just their low starting price.

Vultr Features and Services

Vultr offers a variety of services, including its Cloud Compute – Shared CPU VPS, which is perfect for small to medium-sized websites, email servers, VPN servers, block storage to protect important files, and dedicated instances for users who need higher-level hosting performance. Let’s quickly go over these services to help you understand which option might be the best fit for your project. After that, we’ll dive into some of their other key features.

Operating Systems: Vultr offers a wide range of Linux and Windows versions, and you can even upload your own custom OS ISO to install. They provide various Linux distributions, so no matter what you want to run, you’ll find the right version. Some software performs better on certain operating systems, while it might be completely different on others. Vultr makes it easy to choose the right one for your needs.

Control Panel: Vultr’s control panel makes managing your servers a breeze. If you’re unsure about something, their documentation is available to guide you.

Snapshots: You can create an ISO of your server instance, configure it as needed, and then use it to launch future instances more quickly. This means you only need to go through the customization and setup process once, and it also adds extra reliability for your backups.

Locations: Vultr has 16 different data centers around the world, from Tokyo to Dallas, Los Angeles, and many other locations in between.

Mobility: Not only can you easily deploy new server instances from your workstation, but you can also easily launch and manage servers on the go, even while you’re mobile.

Vultr: Block Storage

Vultr also offers block storage at an affordable price of just $0.10 per GB per month. This is really useful for backups or simply to free up some extra space on your server. You can easily and quickly attach additional storage volumes to your VC2 server directly through Vultr’s interface.

Vultr: Bare Metal Servers

Bare Metal servers are physical machines that provide direct hardware resources to users, without the interference of a virtualization layer. These servers typically offer exclusive compute, storage, and network resources, allowing users full access and control over the hardware.

Key features of Bare Metal servers: no virtualization, high performance, full control, and dedicated resources.

Comparison with Other Server Types

If you don’t want to worry about which websites are next to yours or deal with “bad neighbors” that could negatively impact your site in multiple ways, you can grab a Bare Metal dedicated server from Vultr at an incredibly low price. Their dedicated servers offer you “bare metal” with everything set up for you—dedicated CPUs, SSD storage, and RAM, starting at $120/month for 2X CPUs, 8GB RAM, and 10TB bandwidth.

Vultr: Object Storage

Vultr Object Storage is a high-performance, reliable, and scalable cloud storage service designed for storing and managing massive amounts of unstructured data, such as images, videos, backup files, and more. Based on the S3-compatible protocol, users can easily integrate it into their existing applications or workflows, providing the same seamless experience as major cloud service providers.

Object Storage offers a highly redundant data storage architecture, ensuring data durability and security. Whether you’re frequently accessing data or archiving it long-term, it performs excellently. With its pay-as-you-go model based on storage space and data transfer, users can optimize costs while maintaining great flexibility. In addition, Vultr supports Object Storage across multiple global data centers, allowing users to choose the closest storage node for lower access latency and better performance.

Whether you’re storing static website assets, backing up business data, or integrating it into complex applications, Vultr Object Storage is an efficient and reliable solution that provides developers and businesses with a one-stop cloud storage experience.

Vultr: File System

Vultr File System is a high-performance, distributed storage solution designed to provide users with flexible, scalable, and easy-to-manage file storage services. It supports the Network File System (NFS) protocol, allowing easy mounting across multiple cloud instances. This makes it ideal for handling shared storage needs, such as big data analytics, content management systems (CMS), and containerized workloads.

With a highly redundant data storage architecture, Vultr File System ensures high availability and durability of your data. Even in the event of hardware failures, it guarantees business continuity. Additionally, the pay-per-storage-capacity and data transfer model helps users optimize their costs.

Vultr File System also offers a simple and intuitive control panel, allowing users to easily manage storage resources, adjust capacity, and monitor performance—perfect for rapidly growing businesses and complex application scenarios. Whether for cross-region collaboration or high-throughput requirements, Vultr File System delivers reliable storage support, providing a more efficient experience for cloud computing users.

Vultr: Kubernetes Engine (VKE)

Vultr Kubernetes Engine (VKE) is a managed Kubernetes service designed to simplify the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications. Fully compatible with native Kubernetes, VKE allows developers and operations teams to easily integrate with existing workflows while leveraging Vultr’s global infrastructure to ensure low-latency, high-performance application performance.

VKE offers one-click cluster deployment and automatically handles complex management tasks, such as node health monitoring, cluster upgrades, and elastic scaling, so users can focus on building and optimizing their applications. Additionally, VKE seamlessly integrates with other Vultr products, like Block Storage and Load Balancer, further enhancing system flexibility and reliability.

With its flexible pay-as-you-go pricing model and support for various node configuration options, VKE offers businesses a highly cost-effective Kubernetes solution. Whether you’re a startup or a large enterprise, Vultr Kubernetes helps users quickly build cloud-native applications to meet the demands of modern development and operations.

Vultr: Serverless Inference

Vultr Serverless Inference is a serverless inference service designed for AI and machine learning applications, built for quickly deploying and running model inference tasks. With a serverless architecture, users can easily load and run machine learning models without managing the underlying infrastructure, making it ideal for real-time predictions, image recognition, natural language processing, and other use cases.

This service is billed based on usage and supports highly dynamic resource allocation, helping users efficiently handle peak loads while avoiding wasted idle resources. Additionally, Vultr Serverless Inference is compatible with popular machine learning frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch, allowing users to upload pre-trained models and quickly run inferences, significantly reducing development and deployment time.

With Vultr’s globally distributed data centers, Serverless Inference provides low-latency, high-reliability inference services, making it an ideal choice for building AI-driven applications. Whether you’re a startup or managing large-scale production environments, it’s ready to meet your needs.

Vultr: Container Registry

Vultr Container Registry is a high-performance, user-friendly container image management service designed to support modern development workflows. As a private container image repository, Container Registry provides a secure and reliable storage environment, helping developers and teams easily manage, store, and distribute container images.

This service seamlessly integrates with container platforms like Kubernetes, allowing developers to pull images directly from the Vultr Kubernetes Engine (VKE) and quickly deploy applications. Additionally, Vultr Container Registry offers authentication-based access control to ensure image security. With automatic version management and a high-availability architecture, users don’t have to worry about data loss or redundant builds.

The flexible pricing model based on actual storage usage makes it a cost-effective solution for both personal projects and enterprise-level development. With Vultr’s global network infrastructure, Container Registry provides a convenient and efficient image management experience for containerized workflows, making it the ideal choice for accelerating development and delivery.

Vultr: Managed Databases

Vultr Databases is a managed database service designed to provide users with a simple, efficient, and reliable database management experience. Supporting popular database engines like PostgreSQL, MySQL, Vultr Managed Databases for Caching, and Apache Kafka, Vultr Databases helps users save time and effort with automated deployment, backups, and maintenance, allowing them to focus on building applications.

The service offers a highly available architecture, including automatic failover and redundant storage, ensuring continuous database operation and data security. Performance is scalable on-demand, allowing users to adjust compute and storage resources according to business needs for greater flexibility. Additionally, Vultr Databases integrates seamlessly with the Vultr platform, letting users easily manage instances through an intuitive control panel or automate operations using the API.

With a transparent pay-as-you-go billing model and a global network of data centers, Vultr Databases is the ideal choice for developers and businesses, offering reliable database services whether you’re building a small application or supporting complex distributed systems.

Vultr: Load Balancer

Vultr Load Balancer is a high-performance traffic distribution service designed to optimize the availability, performance, and reliability of applications. With its intelligent distribution mechanism, the Load Balancer evenly distributes user requests across multiple servers, reducing the risk of single points of failure and enhancing system fault tolerance.

It supports various load balancing algorithms (such as round-robin, least connections, etc.) and health check features to ensure that only healthy servers receive traffic. Additionally, Vultr Load Balancer supports HTTP, HTTPS, and TCP protocols, making it adaptable to a variety of application scenarios, and offers auto-scaling functionality to handle peak traffic demands.

With SSL termination and a highly available global data center network, Vultr Load Balancer not only enhances application security but also optimizes access latency. Using a simple control panel or API, users can quickly configure and manage load balancing services, providing a powerful traffic management solution for applications of any size.

Vultr: CDN

Vultr CDN is a high-performance content delivery network service designed to cache and accelerate static resources like images, videos, and scripts through globally distributed edge nodes. This significantly boosts website and app loading speeds, enhancing the overall user experience. Supporting HTTP/2, HTTPS, and custom caching rules, Vultr CDN offers powerful flexibility and security.

Additionally, its easy-to-use control panel and pay-as-you-go pricing model allow users to quickly configure and efficiently manage their CDN services. Whether for small projects or enterprise-level applications, Vultr CDN effectively reduces latency and bandwidth costs.

Although the free version of Cloudflare CDN doesn’t have an “explicit limit” on bandwidth, based on my experience, if your usage exceeds 4TB, they’ll find reasons in their terms of service to push you to upgrade to their business plan – which is much more expensive than Vultr’s Object Storage!

Vultr Performance Review
Vultr has tested its servers against those of several similar hosting companies, including low-end and mid-range plans. Below are the test results and more details about the tests. When a company tells you they’re better than others, it’s natural to be a little skeptical. But in this case, we encourage you to give it a try – especially if you’re switching from another host. Try it out and see the performance for yourself, and stick with the one that works best for your website. Ultimately, we want you to get your money’s worth, whether that’s with Vultr or someone else. Follow the value and the performance!

You’ll notice that the UnixBench scores between Vultr and Rackspace are quite similar in all comparisons. However, when you look at performance per dollar, the situation changes. Essentially, this means you’ll be paying more for a Rackspace plan that offers similar performance to a Vultr option.

The image above shows the mid-range hosting plans offered by each company. While this data is interesting, it’s worth noting that there are many other hosts similar to Vultr that aren’t included in this list, and Rackspace is a well-known managed host, so keep in mind it might be a bit more particular. If you’re looking for hosting, there are many options beyond Vultr, Rackspace, and AWS.

That being said, we did a small test comparing Vultr’s 25GB SSD server (with 1GB of RAM for $5) to Digital Ocean’s $5 server (which has half the RAM).

Both servers were freshly installed with WordPress and had only one optimization plugin called Autoptimize installed. Despite having fewer resources, Digital Ocean was still able to load the page faster. This shows that server performance is much more than just comparing numbers.

Getting twice the memory for the same price sounds great, but if Digital Ocean can load the website faster with less memory, it’s something to consider.

Here are the results of Vultr loading a fresh WordPress installation on its $5 server:

Here are the results of the same test conducted on Digital Ocean’s $5 plan:

The difference is significant. It’s worth noting that performance may vary depending on location, for instance, if Digital Ocean’s servers are closer to Pingdom’s speed test servers. It could also depend on the application, and your mileage may differ for various reasons.

We’ve already seen Vultr outperform several other hosts in their own tests, and in our tests, we saw Digital Ocean outperform Vultr. If you’re truly looking for the best option, we recommend trying both and comparing them side by side with your own projects to see which one performs better. Launching servers is cheap and quick, so spending an extra 5 to 10 minutes testing both is definitely worth it in the long run.

Reliability
Vultr has a fairly standard Service Level Agreement, offering credits if downtime exceeds a certain threshold. Now, if the downtime happens too often and you decide to switch hosts, these credits won’t do you much good, as you wouldn’t want to continue using them anyway. But it’s a good thing— and this situation is unlikely to happen, so you don’t need to worry much about it.

It would be better if they offered actual cash instead of credits, and we think that would be fairer to customers. Regardless, their uptime is quite reliable. Below is the breakdown of the credits you’ll receive in case of outages:

Vultr has implemented redundancy with the goal of achieving 100% uptime. The following excerpt is from their website, where they describe how they achieve this goal. Keep in mind, however, that 100% uptime can only be maintained for so long. We live in the real world, where things can go wrong—incidents happen, equipment can fail, human errors can occur, and so on. But due to the nature of cloud hosting, with so many ways to reroute traffic away from failing servers and recover quickly, the likelihood of these events happening is greatly reduced.

100% Host Node Uptime: “The hardware platform for hosting compute instances is designed with stability as the primary goal. Additionally, our engineering team utilizes proactive monitoring to detect issues early and take preventative measures, minimizing the impact of host node hardware failures on your environment.”

100% Network Uptime: “By leveraging redundant architectures and intelligent BGP routing, Vultr’s core network can smartly bypass disruptive network activity, ensuring 100% uptime and high-performance connectivity across all global POPs.”

Support
One of the standout features of Vultr is their support ticket response time. We sent them a quick inquiry about how to speed up a server, and they responded within minutes and immediately began working on the issue. We really appreciated this, especially considering it was for an unmanaged server.

When it comes to the responsiveness of their support team and their willingness to help, they definitely earn some extra points, and this really plays a big role overall.

Private Network
A Private Network is a fully isolated network that cannot be accessed from the external internet and can only be accessed by instances within your account. Each private network is only available in one data center and cannot span across data centers. A private network allows you to easily transfer data between different data centers in a secure and stable way.

DDoS Protection
Many VPS hosting providers today offer DDoS protection, and Vultr is no exception. However, DDoS protection is an add-on service at Vultr, costing an additional $10 per month. This protection adds an extra layer of security, ensuring that even if your host is under attack, it can remain online or operate at optimal performance.

Vultr’s DDoS mitigation system continuously monitors network traffic and, as soon as a DDoS attack is detected, immediately reroutes the malicious traffic to a buffer zone. It also protects the cloud servers within the Vultr network, ensuring that there is no increased latency or redirection of your traffic to third parties. Currently, DDoS protection is available in 11 regions worldwide:

• Netherlands – Amsterdam

• United Kingdom – London

• France – Paris

• United States – Seattle

• United States – Los Angeles

• United States – Atlanta

• United States – Silicon Valley

• United States – Miami

• United States – New Jersey

• United States – Chicago

• United States – Dallas

Pricing and Plans
Most VPS hosting providers charge on a monthly or yearly basis, meaning you pay the full amount for a plan, even if you don’t use it during the billing cycle. However, Vultr uses an hourly billing model, meaning you’ll only be charged for the hours you use. Once you delete your VPS and stop using it, you won’t be billed anymore.

You typically choose your data center location and hosting configuration based on your needs, and you can either prepay a balance for the month or wait for the invoice to be generated and pay it later.

Payment Methods and Refund Policy
Vultr accepts a variety of mainstream payment methods, including credit cards, PayPal, Bitcoin, and Alipay. However, WeChat Pay is not currently supported. You can prepay for your account to avoid service suspension.

With Vultr’s hourly billing model, there is no need to worry about refunds, as you are only charged for the hours you use. However, any amount you prepay for services cannot be refunded to your account. We recommend taking advantage of their free credit offer: by depositing $25, you’ll receive $300 in free credits. A $100 credit is more than enough to give you a long-term test of their service to see if it truly meets your needs.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does Vultr charge?
Vultr operates on an hourly billing model, meaning you’re charged for the duration of time you use their services (billed by the hour). If you no longer need a service, simply delete your VPS, and you will stop being billed.

How many data centers does Vultr have?
Vultr currently has 16 data centers worldwide. Before deploying a server, you can select the one closest to you, as servers near your location generally perform the best. The number of available data centers varies depending on the hosting plan you choose.

Final Thoughts
Vultr VPS is indeed a great option for setting up a VPN, especially with its pay-as-you-go billing model, Intel SSDs, one-click server deployment, free IP changes, affordable pricing, free IPv6 support, and 16 global data centers. You can use and cancel services at any time based on your needs, which is very convenient. Some lesser-known VPS providers are also good alternatives.

Using Vultr VPS for regular online activities is generally hassle-free. For example, if you’re looking to create a personal blog, you can easily set up the environment on a Vultr VPS, purchase a domain, and point it to the VPS’s IP address to get started.