Vultr Cloud Hosting Review

Company: Vultr

Background: Vultr started in 2014, which, admittedly, even by Cloud hosting standards, is pretty recent. David Aninowsky founded Vultr, currently headquartered in West Palm Beach, Florida. Since commencement, availability has rapidly expanded, with new data centers constantly added. Vultr provides a wide range of Cloud infrastructure services at an affordable price. The agility of their product range means they can fill a wide range of needs. For example, web hosting, game servers, storage silos, and even application servers.

Starting Price: $6.00/mo

Currency: USD

Visit Online: https://www.vultr.com/

Review Summary & Ratings

4

Companies offering Cloud services are perhaps the most misunderstood in the hosting industry. Often seen as expensive, the reality is that Cloud is cheap for what you get. Vultr is a greater example, with low starting prices and excellent potential. The flexibility in use is also impressive – but that’s just the nature of the Cloud.

Pros

• Fast servers and performance
• 100% uptime guarantee
• Many plans available
• Flexible pricing
• Easy to upgrade the resources
• Growing number of data centers

Cons

• Required technical skills to manage
• Poor customer reviews

Pros: What I Like About Vultr Web Hosting

Vultr first came across my radar when I looked at Cloudways. These two brands have a symbiotic relationship, with Cloudways acting as an easy management interface for Vultr’s Cloud platform. Looking directly at Vultr, there is a lot to like about this agile Cloud company.

1. Vultr is Fast Regardless of Server Location

Vultr maintains a unique testing tool that can check latency from your browser to their data centers. I ran the test a couple of times, and the results were impressive. Almost all their data centers responded within 200ms. There are a few exceptions, but those are in more remote locations (as far as I am concerned).

These are direct speeds and can be further optimized if you opt to host with Vultr. A CDN, for example, will help level the number and perform load-balancing. That will give you a more even spread of performance regardless of the server location chosen.

2. 100% Uptime Guarantee

One of the most appealing parts of the Cloud is reliability. With so much hardware linked, there’s never an issue of an equipment failure causing a catastrophe. At worse, you’ll note degraded performance for a little while until they fix the problem. 

Following that train of thought is fine, but Vultr takes it further. The company offers a 100% uptime guarantee in their Service Level Agreement. If that isn’t enough, they also provide a detailed table letting you know how much they’ll reimburse you for varying levels of the service outage.

Cloud robustness? Perhaps. Yet it’s always reassuring to see a service provider that’s clear about the matter.

3. Highly Flexible – Choice in Everything

Vultr currently offers a broad range of Cloud services designed to fit almost all use cases. It doesn’t matter if you want to host a WordPress or WooCommerce website, run an application server, create a massive private Cloud data dump, or anything else.

You can opt for one of their many solutions. It’s essentially the same components, but you get to select the exact parts worth your money. For example, their storage-optimized virtual machines provide standard setups with massive amounts of NVMe storage. That's going to end up fast and capable.

Here are some package types available;

• Cloud compute
• Optimized Cloud compute
• Bare metal
• Kubernetes engine
• Block Storage

You can even choose the type of processors you prefer; Intel or AMD.

4. Vultr Pricing is Extremely Flexible

Those of us running high-performance hosting solutions know that even a tiny change in specifications costs money. Because of the high flexibility in Vultr packages, pricing becomes exceptionally granular. You’ll pay for your precise needs, which you can evaluate down to a per-hour figure. 

That makes Vultr packages much easier to factor into operational costs and planning. Adjusting any of your hosting elements like adding more CPU cores costs just what’s added – not an entire pricing tier above what you currently pay.

5. Upgrading is Simple

Instead of dealing with customer support each time you run out of resources, Vultr is a DIY solution. There’s no real pain here either – just drag a scroll bar to adjust the resource you need. Honestly, it’s as simple as that.

This capability ties into the clean interface that Vultr provides. While it may be somewhat challenging for tech newbies, anyone familiar with web hosting should be able to catch on very quickly.

6. Vultr is Constantly Growing

The concept of a Cloud service that “grows” might sound odd, but I’m referring to their service availability. It seems that the company is constantly adding new data center locations. At present, you can choose from 25 of them. 

While that’s far from the 200+ countries and territories that Google Cloud offers, you’re paying a fraction of the Google price. Plus, it doesn’t look like Vultr expansion is stopping anytime soon. If anything, they’ve stepped up the pace as recently as this year.

Cons: Vultr Drawbacks and Disadvantages

Unfortunately, not everything shiny is suitable for the masses. While powerful, robust, cost-effective, and relatively easy to use, Vultr remains a Cloud service. They can simplify the interface by nature, but some areas remain problematic.

1. Technical Expertise is Necessary

As with all CLoud services, it can be easy to build and launch a virtual server. It’s even possible to quickly deploy an application thanks to Vultr’s one-click deployment tool. Yet managing the safety and performance of your web server is a different matter.

Anyone trying to secure a virtual server will tell you that you better know what you’re doing. It may look fine on the surface, but your web server will be a disaster waiting to happen without adequate security hardening. And that’s the challenging part.

Unless you have the know-how and the time for it, running a Cloud-based server in this manner might not be for you.

2. The Masses Aren’t Convinced

If you Google user reviews about Vultr, you might come across many negative comments. Sadly, that’s a challenge all web hosting companies face. While it’s true that most of this results from poor user understanding, adequate support should fix the matter.

Vultr seems to struggle here, with many new users encountering fundamental problems. From billing to resource management and even comments about the free trial, Vultr needs to step up its support game quickly.

Vultr Pricing & Plans

Because of the vast range of products available on Vultr, I’m only going to cover their generic virtual server plans. These should be the most widely used as they’re flexible enough to handle most tasks.

Vultr Virtual Server Plans

Even in its virtual server product line, Vultr has so many options they’ve even given up on naming the plans. Essentially, you simply scale up the resource ladder as you pay more. Almost everything else is identical.

*AMD and Intel CPU options available for all plans

Alternatives to Vultr Cloud Plans

Compare Vultr vs Linode

Vultr and Linode essentially do the same thing. Because of that, these two companies go head to head. You can see this very obviously in a comparison of their generic plans.

There’s not much to say about these competing hosts except that you’ll face similar challenges at both. There are several competitors in the segment, including the next, Digital Ocean.

Compare Vultr vs Digital Ocean

Again, between Vultr and Digital Ocean; we have on the surface what is an apples-to-apples comparison. Both are in the same field and offer similar advantages to customers.

Aside from slightly more bandwidth on Vultr, both of these brands seem determined to maintain the status quo. Perhaps that’s good news since it’ll keep prices manageable for the rest of us.

Also Read – Is true cloud platform like Vultr & Digital Ocean cheaper?

Final Thoughts For My Vultr Review

Vultr, like others in this space, is often misunderstood by customers. The actual cost of the Cloud isn’t in how much it costs but in the expertise required to maintain the virtual servers adequately. Because of that, many poor reviews likely stem from a lack of competency in this area.

Frequently Asked Questions on Vultr Cloud Hosting

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