Benchmarked faster than DigitalOcean, Vultr & OVH. Your price never rises at renewal. See the numbers Benchmarked #1. No renewal hikes. See the numbers
Skip to content
Sign up
VPS Basics

What is a VPS, in plain English.

A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a virtual server, running its own copy of the operating system, on a single physical server.

For example, a single physical server can host many VPSes, each virtual server being a virtual slice of the physical server, each VPS being completely independent and isolated from the other VPSes, running their own kernel, their own root account, and their own network stack, etc.

A VPS behaves exactly like a real server, but costs a fraction of the price to run, and can be set up in under a minute.

See plan options How our VPS works
The short version

One physical server, sliced into several real servers.

A VPS provider takes a physical server (for example a powerful server with lots of CPU power and lots of RAM) and then runs a hypervisor on it. He then creates several virtual servers (VPS) on that physical server and partitions the resources (CPU power, RAM, disk I/O etc) to create several independent servers. Each server runs its own completely independent kernel, has its own processes, disks etc. Each VPS is in essence a completely separate physical server. Hence V (virtual) and P (private) for Virtual Private Servers.

01

Virtual

The server is virtual in that it is running on shared physical hardware as a number of VPS accounts hosted on that server. The hypervisor does all the work in scheduling CPU time for the virtual servers, passing I/O requests to physical disks, etc. Note that the amount of memory allocated to a virtual server can also be dynamic.

02

Private

The server is private. The physical server with the hypervisor on it can have other Virtual Private Servers on it. But a hypervisor is able to create a very fine grained isolation of the servers on it. This isolation is on kernel level. So your own processes and disks are never seen by the other VPS's on the server. You login on a single server / VPS / "slice" (as a hoster would call it) and you have full root access on it. You don't see the server of your neighbor.

03

Server

A real server: root access, your own OS, your own kernel, your own firewall, your own applications and your way of administration the server, all via SSH access like to any other server.

04

Why bother

Dedicated hardware for rent and leasing of dedicated servers is very expensive. For smaller projects or quick testing of requirements it is far too slow for server rental. Server can be running within a minute as a VPS for a fraction of the costs.

Three options compared

VPS vs shared hosting vs dedicated server.

VPS vs shared hosting vs dedicated server. Here we explore the three common ways of virtualizing your server load.

KVM
Kernel-based Virtual Machine. KVM. The Linux kernel itself acts as the hypervisor. Each VPS is a separate KVM process with hardware-assisted virtualization. This is the virtualization solution that we use.
OpenVZ
Container-based. The shared kernel and the low overhead is great, but for really cheap hosting we use container-based virtual servers, OpenVZ. As you can expect with shared kernel space, it can easily get to a point where the tenants affect each other in a worse way than desired.
Xen
Hypervisor-based. Xen is also used by cloud providers to offer virtualized servers to customers, as it offers the same level of isolation as KVM and thus virtualized servers (VPS) can be run as paravirtualised servers, i.e. that the virtualized servers are running on a guest OS that has been optimized for virtualization.
VMware ESXi
Enterprise hypervisor. It is a very powerful tool, but also very expensive for what you get. This makes it best for the Enterprise, and not for common VPS hosting environments.
When a VPS fits

Common reasons people deploy a VPS.

Production web apps

SaaS platforms, e-commerce backends and content sites that have outgrown shared hosting and need full control over the stack.

API backends

API backends (Mobile & Web). SaaS, E-commerce, Content sites. High performance, Latency sensitive applications that require custom middleware. Can be paired with Managed Databases.

Development environments

Development environments, per-developer or per-team staging environments that mirror production environments. Very cheap so even one per branch is affordable.

Self-hosted tools

Self-hosted tools (GitLab, Nextcloud, Gitea, Plausible, Vaultwarden and many more) that require full control over the host and benefit from having a predictable price tag.

CI/CD runners

Self-hosted runners for GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Drone or Woodpecker. The performance of your runner is not affected by other tenants.

Network services

Small network services, such as WireGuard endpoints, VPN servers, DNS servers or small mail servers. You need a dedicated IP address and rDNS records for them.

Pricing

Three series.
Pick by bottleneck.

For general production workloads, we recommend a standard plan, Dedicated CPU instances for latency sensitive workloads of highest priority and High Memory instances for in-memory workloads such as analytics. We consider both the US and EU regions.

Compare every plan
Standard$18.40/moShared 1:4 vCPU, S-4 to S-64
Dedicated CPU$29.60/moPinned 1:1 cores, D-4 to D-64
High Memory$199.20/mo1:8 RAM ratio, H-64 to H-192

Ready to try a real VPS.
Deploy in under a minute.

Pick a plan for a VPS in a region of your choice and get a VPS up and running within 1 minute with the ability to boot up the VPS and login as root. It will even install an SSH key for you automatically.

Deploy a VPS Compare plans
FAQ

Common questions

What is the difference between a VPS and shared hosting?
Many websites are hosted on one single server (shared server hosting). They all run off the same operating system and the same processes on the server. In contrast, a VPS is an isolated area on a server. The VPS has its own kernel, you have root access and it has its own assigned resources (for example RAM, disk space and CPU). This enables you to install any software you require, rather than being confined to whatever software the hosting service has preinstalled on the server.
When should I move from shared hosting to a VPS?
When you need root access, when your traffic outgrows shared resource limits, when you need software the shared host does not offer, or when noisy neighbour behaviour on shared hosting affects you.
What is the difference between a VPS and a dedicated server?
A dedicated server is a physical server which is fully rented to one customer. A VPS (virtual private server) is a virtual slice created on a single physical server and each VPS is isolated from other VPSes on the server using a hypervisor (on our KVM servers the Linux kernel is used as the hypervisor). A dedicated server is the most expensive option and takes longer to provision; a VPS is generally a mid-price option which can be provisioned in under a minute.
How does KVM virtualization work?
KVM virtualization is implemented in the Linux kernel itself to function as a hypervisor. Each VPS runs as a separate process on the host (a KVM process) and uses hardware-assisted virtualization support from the host CPUs (AMD-V on AMD or Intel VT-x on Intel). Performance is comparable to bare metal and VPSes are fully isolated from each other as if each VPS were running on its own physical host.
What can I run on a VPS that I cannot run on shared hosting?
Root access, custom kernel modules, server-level applications such as Docker and Kubernetes, database servers, firewalls, mail servers, OpenVPN servers, monitoring stacks and more.
How much CPU and RAM do I actually need?
4 GB RAM and 2-4 vCPUs is a good rule of thumb for most production web applications. More RAM can be useful for databases on your server, and more CPUs can be useful for CPU-bound APIs which can be pinned to specific cores to improve performance. We would start with an S-8 or D-8 server and scale up from there based on usage.
What is the difference between Standard and Dedicated CPU?
Standard plans are based on a maximum of one virtual processor per four customers (a 1:4 ratio), while each Dedicated vCPU is pinned 1:1 to a physical core and is never time-sliced with the virtual processors of other customers. Dedicated CPU plans offer per-core low latency for CPU-intensive applications that Standard plans cannot offer.
Do I need DevOps skills to run a VPS?
Basic Linux administration helps a lot. If you can SSH into a machine, install packages and read systemd logs, you can run a VPS for a small production workload.
Can I switch operating systems on a running VPS?
Reinstall to any supported distribution from the control panel, usually within a minute or two. All data on the disk is wiped, so place a full backup first if you need to retain anything.
How is a VPS billed?
VPSes are billed monthly, and there is also the option to pay annually or every two years with a discount of 15% for annual payment and 20% for a two-year payment. Plan prices are frozen for the term you pay for; there are no price hikes at renewal.
Ready to deploy

Deploy a measured VPS

From $18.40/mo on a 2-year term. KVM on AMD EPYC, NVMe RAID10, ECC memory. Your price is fixed for the lifetime of the service.

See all plansDeploy now
Keep exploring
See VPS plans and pricingReady to choose one?VPS vs VPNHow they differ.What a BuyVPS instance includesKVM, full root, NVMe.Supported Linux distributionsPick your OS.