If you are planning on setting up a site for a business that will make you money in the long run, then the obvious way to do it is to start out small by spending as little as possible so you have more room to grow. If your site is personal, then you should look for the cheapest solution even more. Free hosting is a good start, but heavy traffic can bring your site to a crawl. The same goes to shared hosting, plus you don’t have full control. Even the cheapest dedicated hosting plans can be expensive, but virtual private server could fit the bill nicely.

When compared with shared web hosting providers, virtual private servers still cost a lot more and that may tempt you to find a cheap VPS hosting package possible and they are not that difficult to find. Have a look at the pros and cons before you make your decision.

Pros

There’s only one real advantage of a cheap VPS plan - that it’s cheap. Even if the difference in hosting package is a mere , you’ll save much in the course of time. Provided you’re not discouraged by any of the drawbacks, a cheap VPS may be an optimal solution for your site. If your site is intended for a local community and you live near to the location where it’s hosted, you can also profit from extra speed. Finally cheap VPS providers are a good inexpensive way to learn the ropes of being an administrator and finding out if it is really the type of hosting that your site needs.

Cons

Although this may not apply to every cheap VPS provider, their support may be limited. This is often because of the fact that some providers do not own any data centers and instead get them from the bigger companies giving them the roles as resellers. That basically boils down to possible delays due to a longer line of communication between companies. Technical support isn’t free for some companies either so be sure to read their terms. Finally, cheap VPS isn’t recommended in case of corporate sites, as some providers may not guarantee full control of important operations, e.g. backups.

Bottom Line

Similar to regular shared web hosting, you pretty much get what you pay for, but that does not make cheap VPS hosts all that bad because there are some services out there that do their job well if you do enough research while pricier VPS packages may have extra features that you may not need. If you still aren’t sure of what to take, you can always find a VPS provider that offers an easy transition from the cheapest to an improved plan, so that you don’t have to take pains to change the host only for the sake of upgrading.

The cheapest VPS packages cost usually from per month, the price going up to , which is still not bad if you only can afford it. Still, make sure to take a really good look at the terms and check the provider’s reviews before singning with him.