Best Free VPS UK Providers Compared in 2024 (On-Going Case Study)

Hostinger has been dubbed the best almost free VPS provider of 2024 because they are ridiculously affordable (starting from £4.99/month). Hostinger’s user base has grown rapidly, over 2 million users in a decade. Their growth is impressive, as is their performance, uptime, and speed.

Hostinger has servers across the world in the U.K., Europe, Asia, and the USA. With a connection speed of 1000 Mbps, they’re able to offer exceptional response times. Just one of the many reasons why I personally love Hostinger.

Hostinger’s VPS hosting offers a dedicated IP, full root access (not all offer this), NVMe disk drives, and IPv6 support. Hostinger has a wide range of operating systems to choose from, easily installed with a few clicks. They recommend CentOS due to its speed and reliability (which I can vouch for).

Their baseline VPS plan comes with 4GB memory, 50 GB storage (plenty for most sites), and 1000 GB bandwidth. VPS hosting is only £4.99 per month which is absolutely amazing.

Pros:

• 30-day money-back guarantee
• Fast servers and response times (perfect for SEO)
• Easy to use custom control panel
• Cloud backups protected by RAID
• 24/7/365 customer support
• Powerful hardware and NVMe technology.
• Free site builder and domain name
• Good average uptime >99.9%
• VPS AI Assistant
• 1 Free Snapshot
• 50 GB-400 GB NVMe
• Knowledge Base

Cons:

• Have to be logged in to use the live chat

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A2 Hosting was founded back in 2001. They’re not 100% free VPS, as you’ll need to pay for the service, however, A2 Hosting do offer a cool “Anytime” MoneyBack guarantee. In reality, you’ll only get a FULL refund within 30 days and thereafter they offer a pro-rated refund.

A2 Hosting is a straight forward VPS provider that offers a completely managed service. Therefore they are suitable for complete beginners who want to take a more hands-off approach to server management. With three straight forward packages to choose from that offer up to 75GB storage, 4GB RAM, and 2 TB transfer.

Pros:

• 24/7 Live Support
• 99.9% Uptime Commitment
• Free Server Rewind Backup
• Free Account Migration
• Free SSD
• Free SSH
• Free SSL Certificate

Cons:

• SSL certificates have a 7-day refund window
• Domain registrations, setup fees and migration fees are non-refundable

Digital Ocean is a cloud hosting company based out of New York, USA. They have 12 data centers across 195 different countries. Digital Ocean specialize in cloud hosting, with a mission to simplify cloud computing.

The best thing about Digital Ocean is the fact you can get your site up and running for free. However, you’ll need to supply a credit card to set up your 60-day free trial. It is really simple to create an account and get up and running within seconds with the Google signup button.

Digital Ocean offers a nice Server Management platform called “SetupServer.io”, which is a feature-rich VPS server management platform. Inside their platform, you can manage all aspects of your websites/ databases and users. As well as security, SSL certificates, settings, and backups.

Pros:

• £100 to spend during your 60 Day Free Trial
• Local Backups
• Servers optimized for SEO and performance
• Value-driven customer focus
• Daily backups
• End to end encryption
• You can trial any of the Digital Ocean products
• 1-click apps
• 99.9% Uptime SLA
• Cloud firewalls
• Deploy your VPS in seconds
• Google signup
• Easy to use API

Cons:

• Backups cost extra
• Credit card required to register for free service

Founded in 2010, Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service from Microsoft. Azure is a world-class host trusted by 90% of fortune 500 companies who run on the Microsoft Cloud. With the free account from Microsoft Azure you get 8 TB of storage/ month.

You can provision up to 14 virtual machines and 50 virtual networks. Additionally Microsoft Azure has a list of “always free services”, these include App Service with Node.js and PHP, 1 million requests per month, Face API machine learning, DevTest Labs developer tools, and much more.

Microsoft Azure offers a wide range of features that can be added to your VPS hosting account. Including blockchain features that allow you to build and grow blockchain networks. Cost management tools can be added to ensure that you can manage your VPS usage, which can come in handy with the pay as you use hosting model

Pros:

• Massive global network
• 12 months free
• £150 credit
• Secure Infrastructure
• Free tutorials
• Meet requirements for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
• Feature-rich, scalable hybrid cloud infrastructure

Cons:

• The pay as you use model can quickly mount up
• Complex for the beginner

Google Cloud Platform has both a 12-month free service and an “Always Free” service. With the anytime free service, you get 28 instance hours per day and 1GB storage. You also get 120 build-minutes per day and one f1-micro instance of the Google Compute Engine.

There is an option to launch free trials of their paid marketplace solutions.  Signup is really straight forward if you already have a Google account.

Google cloud has a great range of Cloud Management tools. Inside the console, you can manage all areas of your service from billing to APIs, security features, and all areas of your Google Cloud server. The console is extremely user friendly and easy to navigate.

Pros:

• Great developer solutions
• Lots of free features
• 12 months free and some anytime free
• Easy to use UX to manage all aspects of your VPS

Cons:

• Not for the novice VPS user

Club VPS was founded back in 1999 and specializes in cloud hosting. You get access to their full suite of services during your 30-day free trial so you can get a good feel of their product offering. No credit card is required to get started, which is nice. Club VPS is perfect for beginners as their service is uncluttered and streamlined so that even the novice VPS user can set up and manage their VPS with Club VPS.

You can sign up for your free trial in seconds with Club VPS. You’ll then be taken to their console subdomain that has a clean user-friendly UX. Suitable for those starting out in the VPS space. Inside the console, you get clear usage reports to make sure that you don’t rack up a huge hosting bill.

Pros:

• Secure servers with 24/7 surveillance
• No credit card required
• Phone and email support
• 30 Day free trial
• Facebook, Slack and Google Login – making it easy to sign up and get started
• Choose server location easily
• Monitor usage

Cons:

• 24/7 support only available for the Israel department, other offices/ data centers are open during office hours.
• No uptime guarantee

VPS Server is an American based hosting company. The free trial from the VPS server gets you access to their 13 server locations. You can start a free trial on any of their four lower-tier VPS products which offer up to 4GB of memory and 100GB disk space. If you’re looking for more help with your VPS then VPS Server also offers a completely managed service.

The features offered from VPS Server are straight forward and easy for the beginner to set up. They offer a feature-rich control panel inside which you can manage all aspects of your VPS like restarting your server, rebooting, and other deploying other features.

Pros:

• 24/7 Support
• No downtime
• Completely managed VPS service available
• £250 Deposit Hosting Bonus
• Clean and easy to use customer control panel
• Install apps like WordPress or Joomla easily
• Bitcoin is accepted
• Expanding into new VPS server locations
• 100% SSD storage

Cons:

• Free trial (just 7 days) is a bit short

CloudSigma was founded a decade ago in Switzerland and has now expanded to ten cloud locations. They offer nice management tools and a completely flexible VPS environment.

The best thing about the free trial from CloudSigma is the fact that they offer their free trial without having to input your credit card details.

CloudSigma offers high powered, super-efficient VPS protocols based on KVM. They offer flexible and transparent pricing after the free trial expires. Their customer service is also highly rated. The servers are also super secure.

Pros:

• 7 Day free trial
• No credit card needed to sign up
• cPanel & Plesk
• Next-Gen KVM technology
• Easy for a beginner to get started with a VPS
• ISO 27001 Certified Public Cloud
• Comprehensive tutorial bank

Cons:

• Limited information on spec

DediSERVE is a cloud-based hosting provider that was established a decade ago (in 2009) with headquarters in Ireland. DediSERVE now has servers in 17 locations around the world.

With the DediSERVE free trial, you get unrestricted access for 72 hours with 2GB bandwidth. That should be enough to let you check out whether or not they are the host for you.

DediSERVE has great features and management tools to allow you to provision and monitor your VPS in seconds, including full root access as well as deep usage statistics and analytics to give you total visibility of the activity on your server. They also have a wide range of pre-built apps and templates.

Pros:

• Free mobile apps to monitor your cloud resources
• Intuitive interface to manage your resources
• 24/7/365 customer support
• Load balancing available
• Backup and disaster recovery
• Autoscaling
• Automated backups
• API access
• Data encryption for added security

Cons:

• Free trial really short (just 72 hours)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has three levels of FREE VPS services to choose from – “Always FREE”, “12 months free” or “free trials”. The always free option has a range of free services for you to get started with AWS.

The free tier offered from Amazon gets you 750 hours of usage, 5GB, if you go over the assigned resources then you are on a pay as you go, model. Other free tier features include cloud-based email service restricted to 62,000 outbound emails per month – that is over 2k emails per day, which is a lot for most businesses.

AWS is a more complex VPS service, however, they do provide a wide range of tutorials. The AWS Console allows you to monitor all aspects of your AWS VPS including monitoring your spending (which is important with a pay as you use service).

You can also manage security and search for additional features on the services menu to alter your VPS. I like the fact that AWS offers a free app to manage your server from your mobile device.

Pros:

• 10 Minute tutorials guide you through setup
• Get started completely free
• No credit card needed
• Mobile app available
• Good management tools
• Create an account without a credit card
• Service limit to stop you going way over budget

Cons:

• Complicated, not for beginners
• You’ll get charged if you go over your assigned resources

InMotion has been around since 2001 and is a well-established hosting provider. With state of the art tech and good uptime and performance, it’s no wonder InMotion is so confident that you’ll love their service.

Not 100% free, but you get peace of mind that you can get a refund for a full 90 days, which is very honorable.

InMotion offers some great support center guides for getting your VPS up and running. They also offer an Account Management Panel (AMP) where you can manage all aspects of your VPS as well as add on additional products.

Pros:

• Free cPanel
• Award-winning support team
• 100% satisfaction guarantee
• 99.9% Uptime
• Easy to install applications
• Free backups
• Google Apps integration
• Great security features
• Free domain

Cons:

• Prices increase after 24 months