Vultr Review: How Does The Infrastructure Cloud Measure Up?
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Our Verdict: #1 for Compute Instances
Vultr offers various cloud hosting hosting plans, including dedicated cloud servers and block storage. They feature pure SSD storage, Intel Xeon CPUs, a selection of custom and industry-standard control panels, and global datacenters while allowing you to choose from various Linux distributions, including CentOS.
Click any of the Vultr links on this page to get high performance dedicated cloud hosting starting at $60 per month.
Pros:
- Great range of plans in both performance and pricing
- Sturdy cloud infrastructure
- Easy-to-monitor hourly billing
Cons:
- Not beginner-friendly
- No live chat or phone support
Read reviews from actual Vultr actual customers. If Vultr doesn’t seem like a good fit for your site, check out our best web hosts page for alternatives.
Is Vultr the Best Host for Your Website?
Curious about something specific? Jump to our most popular sections:
- Expert Review — read our thorough analysis by hosting specialist, David Delony.
- Best Reviews — see what almost Vultr customers have to say.
- Hosting Plans — compare the best Vultr hosting plans and their prices.
- FAQs — find the answers to the most asked questions about Vultr!
Vultr.com is a web hosting company with a team of over 60 people based in Matawan, New Jersey. They have 16 datacenters across 4 continents and offer cloud services – including cloud and dedicated hosting.
This hosting provider caters to a variety of customers, whether it is $2.50 per month cloud hosting or a high-performance bare metal server. In this review, I’ll look at what Vultr offers and who it is right for.
Vultr Pros and Cons
If you don’t want to read the entire Vultr review, start with the pros and cons to get a rough idea of what is on offer.
Pros
Sturdy cloud infrastructure
Great range of plans in both performance and pricing
Global datacenters across 4 continents
Pure SSD storage
Easy-to-monitor hourly billing.
Cons
Tech-savvy hosting and likely not beginner-friendly
No live chat or phone support
No flexibility in payment date.
Services and Specializations
Vultr claims their low latency memory servers to be 28% faster than standard.
The company has three major services: Vultr Cloud Compute or VC2, block storage, and dedicated instances.
VC2 is geared for intense computing tasks, block storage is for, well, storage, and the dedicated instance offers the advantages of both a private cloud and a managed server.
One thing that Vultur offers that a lot of other hosting companies don’t is root access.
Operating System And Software Flexibility
This means that users can make major changes to the operating system, as well as being able to edit the main configuration files without having to use files like Apache’s .htaccess.
Customers can choose from several major Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, CentOS, and Debian. Windows and FreeBSD are also available. Customers can upload their own bootable .iso files. This means that customers have maximum flexibility with software.
They can use a basic LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), or mix things up with FreeBSD server using NGINX for the web server, PostgreSQL for the database and Python for hosting the actual application.
Vultr Cloud Compute V2
This basic yet effecive cloud computing plan is highly customizable and is offered in 10 different tiers:
| Storage (SSD) | CPU | Memory | Bandwidth | Price/mo | Price/hr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 GB | 1 | 512 MB | 0.5 TB | $2.50 | $0.004 |
| 10 GB | 1 | 512 MB | 0.5 TB | $3.50 | $0.005 |
| 25 GB | 1 | 1024 MB | 1 TB | $5.00 | $0.007 |
| 55 GB | 1 | 2 GB | 2 TB | $10.00 | $0.015 |
| 80 GB | 2 | 4 GB | 3 TB | $20.00 | $0.030 |
| 160 GB | 4 | 8 GB | 4 TB | $40.00 | $0.060 |
| 320 GB | 6 | 16 GB | 5 TB | $80.00 | $0.119 |
| 640 GB | 8 | 32 GB | 6 TB | $160.00 | $0.238 |
| 1280 GB | 6 | 64 GB | 10 TB | $320.00 | $0.476 |
| 1600 GB | 24 | 96 GB | 15 TB | $640.00 | $0.952 |
Dedicated Instances And Bare Metal Simplified (Dedicated Servers)
Vultr lays out two dedicated server choices: Dedicated Instances (cloud servers) or Bare Metal Simplified (Dedicated hardware servers).
These solutions are ideal for applications that require high performance or high privacy, as the system isn’t shared.
All dedicated plans come with:
100% guaranteed SLA
Solid state drives
Root access
Free DDoS protection (North America only)
Simple-to-integrate API
Vultr’s powerful control panel (or Plesk, cPanel and other alternatives).
Dedicated Cloud Servers
For those who want more control than a shared system offers, the dedicated instances allow users to rent a percentage of a server or a whole machine.
The dedicated cloud is only available at Vultr’s New Jersey and Japan datacenters. The basic Dedicated Instance starts at $60.00 per month and boasts 2 CPUs, 8192 MB Memory, and 10 TB Bandwidth.
Bare Metal Servers
Bare Metal servers are new and can be purchased as a single plan offering:
E3-1270v6 Processor
8 CPUs @ 3.8Ghz
32768 MB Memory
5000 GB Bandwidth
10GbE Ethernet.
This plan costs $120.00/month, or in Vultr’s billing format, $0.179 per hour.
Control Panels And Applications
Customers manage their instances through an attractive web-based control panel. Users can start servers, reboot them, create new images and reinstall the operating system.
This makes it very easy to perform out-of-band management or things that are impossible to do without console access, like rebooting a system, without being logged off, as can happen with SSH.
The control panel also gives users access to support, billing, affiliates, and account status. They can see their CPU usage, bandwidth usage and their charges at a glance.
Applications, Mobile Apps and Console Access
The control panel is also available as a mobile app, so customers can check their servers on the go. It’s also useful for on-call engineers since they can access and diagnose problems with servers remotely, even when they might not be near a computer.
The control panel offers console access. This lets admins use the command-line to perform out-of-band tasks while staying logged in.
Vultr also has a number of popular applications that can be installed with one click, such as Drupal, Docker, and WordPress. This saves users a lot of time installing these applications from scratch.
Vultr Reviews by Our Community
Overall Rating from 3 Reviews by Vultr Customers
| Support | |
|---|---|
| Quality | |
| Features | |
| Value |
Most Helpful Reviews
Beny Ibrani vivagroup.co.id
Sep 07, 2018
Vultr is the best choice and multi options vps also baremetal, it could fit whatever we needs. My self already compared it with some other VPS, but based on my own benchmark using fio and bench.sh, its still on the first level. The support, Iops and bandwidth speed is great !!! We are very happy to be hosted with them !!
Roy Tan wiib.com.tw
Jul 02, 2019
They always have network issues, it just happen and you won’t know when. I had opened 7 tickets regarding the same issues happen on Private network
It just keep happen in random, about once per months. Since AWS has lightsail, I recommended AWS than Vultr
The only reason I choose Vultr, because it’s a fixed price VPS provider with Japan datacenter
Emircan YILDIZ marmara.edu.tr
Mar 20, 2019
Clean and easy to use interface. They are super fast! You can r/w very speedy to disk.
You can’t see this from another company also they are quite cheap. Tons of distro you can choose but if you don’t like any of them you can install your iso. There is OpenVPN for quick install. Customer service is very helpful also you can find anything from the docs.
Vultr Infrastructure And Security
All of Vultr’s instances run on SSDs, which gives a substantial speed boost over conventional hard drives. This translates into faster page load times. The SSDs are hosted on highly available clusters.
Vultr hosts three copies of block storage drives for redundancy in case something happens to a drive.
Datacenters
Vultr has 16 datacenters located across several continents, include North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Vultr can serve web pages using anycast addressing.
9 datacenters are located in the U.S. with a further 7 in:
London
Paris
Frankfurt
Amsterdam
Singapore
Tokyo
Sydney.
This means that if a customer deploys servers in Vultr’s datacenters in different locations, users will get the page that’s geographically closest to them.
The company’s reputability and belief in speed are supported by the wide global spread of datacenters.
Private Networks
Vultr also allows for regional private networks for one account. A customer might have a front-end web proxy, several computer servers, and block storage all connected together.
Logically, they’ll look like their own network even though they are hosted with a remote company. Each server can have multiple IPv4 addresses, with the option for IPv6 support.
Vultr also features BGP announcement of a customer’s IP address space, which means that a customer can use their own IP addresses with Vultr.
Excellent Choice For Developers
Customers can also use Vultr’s API to automatically spin up instances and query their status. All of the operations are performed over standard HTTP.
This makes Vultr a good choice for people developing web applications. Since the API uses HTTP and JSON, developers can use it with almost any scripting language, since many of them already contain libraries to handle both of these methods.
A customer’s servers spread out across datacenters will fail over in case one goes down for extra reliability using the same IP address.
Customer Support, Uptime, and Billing
Technical support is handled by creating tickets through the dashboard. Vultr’s customer support team does not offer live chat or phone support.
Vultr also has an extensive documentation section on its website that covers a range of common administrative tasks. It should suit everyone from beginners to experienced Unix/Linux wizards.
Topics include installing and configuring Linux, web servers, and other popular applications.
Uptime Guarantee And Compensation
The company claims a 100% host node and network uptime in its SLA.
Vultr offers uptime credits in case the company does suffer an outage, up to 672 hours in cases of outages over seven hours.
Billing Of Hosting Services
Vultr doesn’t have long-term contracts, which gives customers more flexibility. Vultr can bill users either by the month or by the hour.
Users can pay by popular credit and debit cards.
Summary
Vultr is a hosting company specializing in cloud computing, and more importantly, fast cloud computing. It’s a good choice for those who want a customizable experience.
With multiple datacenters and SSD storage, Vultr is a reliable option for nearly any application.
If you are a web developer – just starting out or with years of experience – they are a good option. Visit Vultr.com now to see if they are right for you.
Contributing editor: Marko Csokasi.
Most Popular Vultr Hosting Plans
| Dedicated Cloud | |
|---|---|
| Disk Space | 120GB |
| Bandwidth | 10TB |
| Price | $60 / mo (Billed as $60 Per Month) ⓘPrices in are approximate, based on current exchange rates. The host will likely charge you in USD, or at a different exchange rate. Usual price: – Get % off! |
| Visit Vultr Now |
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Vultr Frequently Asked Questions
- What type of storage does Vultr offer?
Along with its powerful cloud servers and hosting services, Vultr purely offers SSD storage. The largest available storage packs include either 2×240 GB SSD storage blocks, alternatively 4×120 GB SSD blocks.
- How does hourly billing work with Vultr?
Vultr bills all their hosting services at an hourly rate. Until a monthly rate cap of 672 hours (28 days) of online time, users are billed at their respective hourly rates. Online time in excess of 28 days comes with no extra costs. For example, if you are in a Bare Metal dedicated server contract and were online for 592 hours last month, you will be billed 592 x your hourly rate.
- How is bandwidth charge calculated?
Bandwidth charges are not calculated on an individual inbound or outbound basis. The overall bandwidth charges of your cloud hosting or dedicated server plan are determined by the highest bandwidth of either your inbound or outbound traffic. If you have an inbound bandwidth of 15 GB and an outbound bandwidth of 8 GB, you will be billed for 15 GB bandwidth.
Sherrie Gossett
July 25, 2019
Vultr is the only host I know of – apart from Amazon Web Services and Fastly – that you can use U2F security keys with. Would like to see more widespread acceptance of U2F in the hosting world.
That said, you can secure code repositories like GitHub and BitBucket with U2F keys and CMSs like Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla.