When the shared environment is no longer enough for our website growth, vps hosting plan is the best choice before we have to upgrade to dedicated server solution. However, since vps is being offered by almost every hosting company, it's little hard to determine which service plan is offering quality service. Especially when some super cheap vps server being advertised everywhere, start users will always be misguided. After one year's experience with some popular vps hosting providers, I would like to compare the top 5 vps hosting brands. Generally speaking, each solution in the list will work according to people's different requirements.

What's considered when choosing a vps hosting plan?

Pricing and server reliability are definitely the most important part when we evaluate the servers. However, the price will always not match with the service quality if you selected the wrong type service. For vps hosting purpose, the following factors are considered before you start the service research.

Network Abilities -Speed is always the most important factor when we evaluate a potential service plan. The quality service products are always generated from well-known datacenters. If the hosting provider does not have their  own DC, make sure to choose from the popular DC names such as in this world class datacenters list.

Server Specifications -I'm not talking about the VPS server because we can always choose how much we need. I'm talking about the host server where the VPS created from. For vps hosting purpose, the host server must have at least 24GB RAM with Intel Dual Quad Core plus RAID 10 Disk. Also, try to ask pre-sales support for about how many vps instance they're managing per host server.

Virtual Technologies -There're many virtualization technologies on the market. But not all of them are suitable for hosting environment. Some good names such as virtuozzo, hyper-v, openvz, xen, vmware etc.

Support Availability -Don't choose a service who does not respond within one minute. One minute is enough to your business disaster. Sign up those service who can offer real 24×7 tech support.

Some tips are also available on our previous vps hosting posting.

What's the top 5 list for vps hosting?

Please note, The top 5 vps hosting in my list are mainly focus on those hosting companies who can offer entire hosting solutions including shared, vps, reseller and dedicated servers. The dedicated server companis are not included such as rackspace, softlayer etc. The top 5 vps hosting names in my list are Hostgator, Greengeeks, Coolhandle, InmotionHosting, Arvixe. Each in the service names have their own unique advantages. Here I would like to make a basic introduction and introduction. Let's look below for a table list of their service specifications

As we see, all the 5 vps services have their own advantages either in space/datatransfer or pricing. The hostgator is probably most well known by people because of their leading position in the business. However, that doesn't mean there's no weakness with their vps hosting plans. For example they do not offer windows vps solutions. Actually, only arvixe can offer windows vps in the list. The advantage with arvixe windows vps is their hyper-v integration. it's officially supported by Microsoft company. Since windows server is also MS product, it's logically to know hyper-v has the best performance with windows vps.

For start users who do not have too much requirement for server and just want to learn server management skills for simple website hosting, hostgator is definitely the most ideal choice because of their price. Inmotion vps is featured for it's stability and their team officially announced no oversale, their weakness is the high price with the server specs. The arvixe is obviously most outstanding in any side comparison. Just twice more the other vps features and you will see the big difference.

Have more thoughts about the list? Feel free to post your comments or contact me directly for further communication