In this review of Vultr, I am excited to share with you my first impressions of this relatively new hosting service. Specifically, we’ll be looking at WordPress VPS hosting on Vultr’s Cloud Compute infrastructure.
Read on below to see if Vultr cloud hosting is a right fit for you.
Vultr Cloud Compute Pricing
One of the biggest draws to Vultr for me is their affordable monthly pricing. Starting at just $2.50/month for a virtual private server, Vultr accommodates a wide range of websites.
The entry-level web hosting plan with Vultr provides 10 GB of SSD storage, 1 CPU core, 512 MB of RAM, and 0.50 TB of monthly bandwidth. Consequently, Vultr’s cheapest hosting plan will cost you just 4⁄10¢/hour.
If that doesn’t meet your needs, you can 5x the storage space and 4x the RAM and bandwidth for just $10/month (or 1.5¢/hour).
In all, Vultr offers 10 different Cloud Compute plans ranging all the way up to $640/month for a seriously legit 1,600 GB SSD, 24 core CPU, 96 GB RAM, and 15 TB bandwidth.
While your website might not need that much resources just yet, all you have to know is that scaling up with Vultr is super-simple and can be done with the click of a button.
My Experience With WordPress on Vultr
I’ll admit, I was skeptical to move my WordPress hosting over to a little-known company like Vultr. But since I wasn’t satisfied with the performance of my former website host, I knew I had to make a move.
At that point, I thought I would have to spend a bunch of money to get high-quality hosting; however, I was wrong.
As I’m writing this review, I can’t specifically recall how I found out about Vultr—perhaps an ad. Whatever the case, I’m sure glad it crossed my radar.
Vultr WordPress One-Click Install
The process of setting up WordPress on Vultr is as simple as selecting WordPress under the Application tab for your Server Type.
Then when you click on the Deploy Now button, Vultr will do its magic and setup your server instance in a matter of seconds.
One very tiny setback that some might consider a dealbreaker is the fact that you can only install WordPress with one click on Ubuntu. Personally, I prefer Ubuntu as my unix-based operating system of choice. But for some of you who have stricter requirements, you’ll have to manually install WordPress if you want to run a CentOS, Debian, Fedora, or even Windows server on Vultr.
Finally when your new server is running, you’ll find login instructions and credentials for WordPress right there on your dashboard. Additionally, Vultr even provides instructions on how to setup your DNS records. These two gestures on the part of Vultr are super meaningful, especially when compared to other hosting companies.
For a more detailed walkthrough on deploying WordPress on Vultr, check out my other Vultr tutorial.
Migrating WordPress to Vultr
First and foremost, the simplest way to migrate a WordPress website is with the All-in-One WP Migration plugin.
On your current WordPress website, install the plugin and export your site. This plugin literally exports everything: posts, pages, pictures, plugins, and databases.
Then in your WordPress instance on Vultr, install the same plugin, but this time import the file you exported. In a matter of minutes, your WordPress website now runs on Vultr.
More Reasons Why I Like Vultr
Aside from cheap pricing, there are a host (pun intended) of other reasons that I like Vultr.
Server Credentials and Details
I love the fact that Vultr provides a dashboard with all of the credentials for your server. You’ll find your server’s IP address and hidden password on this dashboard along with basic specs.
The best part is the little button next to the IP and password that allows you to copy the values with a click.
In addition, this dashboard contains a text-based application information section with everything from how to access your databases to performance analysis tools.
Here’s an example of what this section of the dashboard looks like.
WordPress Server Details To complete your WordPress installation, follow these instructions. 1. Log into the WP admin panel using the following credentials: https://12.34.56.78/wp-admin/ NOTE: these credentials are only for the security prompt, not for wp-admin. You choose what the username and password are during the installation. User: user12345 Pass: password 2. Point your domain name "A record" to: 12.34.56.78 3. Edit your "WordPress Address (URL)" and "Site Address (URL)" to match your domain name. This is located in: WordPress Admin, Settings, General. XHProf (Performance Analysis) Details https://12.34.56.78/xhprof/xhprof_html/ User: xhprof12345 Pass: password PHPMyAdmin Details https://12.34.56.78/mysqladmin/ User: mysql12345 Auth Pass: password1 Pass: password2 Security and Malware Maldet is disabled by default but it is highly recommended you enable this feature as it scans for and removes malware on detection from your Wordpress site. Use the following command to enable it. systemctl enable --now maldet Use the following command to disable Maldet. systemctl disable --now maldet Control Panel details You can use Cockpit, a control panel, to manage your instance and software. https://12.34.56.78:9090 User: root Pass: (server root password) Use the following command to disable the control panel. systemctl disable --now cockpit.socket Read more about this WordPress app on Vultr Docs: https://www.vultr.com/docs/one-click-wordpress
Detailed Usage Graphs
Before Vultr, I was using a host with unlimited bandwidth. When switching to Vultr, I was extremely leery about having a bandwidth quota.
Turns out that Vultr makes it very transparent about how much bandwidth your website uses.
The bandwidth monitoring shows you how much data your website consumed on a daily basis. The monitor even goes a step further and brakes it down by upload and download.
Full Root SSH Access on Vultr
While managing a WordPress website shouldn’t need root access, it’s nice to know that it’s available with Vultr.
It’s actually very easy to login via SSH to your Vultr server. Just execute the SSH command with your IP or domain name and paste the root password and you’re in.
Best of all, because you’re root out-of-the-box, no need to prefix all your commands with sudo.
Additionally, if you need them, Vultr has a whole tutorial on generating SSH keys here, which are also managed from within your dashboard..
Drawbacks of Vultr
This Vultr review wouldn’t be complete or fair without mentioning the things I dislike about this web hosting company.
Downgrading Not Possible
Most prominently, downgrading isn’t possible with Vultr. In other words, once you pick a web hosting tier, you can not go down a level. Vultr cites the following as a reason this isn’t possible:
Note: Downgrading is currently not supported. Shrinking the hard disk is not possible without risking data loss.
As with most things in the tech world, everything is possible. You can obviously use the migration plugin mentioned above to export your site, spin up another Vultr instance, and import it to get around this roadblock.
So I guess this is pretty much just an annoyance more than anything.
Not Built for Noobs
The fact that you must have some experience with website hosting is another downside to Vultr. Vultr is not a product tailored towards the non-techy.
When you compare it to sites like Squarespace and Wix, Vultr is leaps and bounds harder to use.
While that’s the case, I don’t think Vultr is targeting that demographic.
Actually, it’s part of my mission with the Tony Teaches Tech YouTube channel to bridge this gap and help business owners who want a website avoid forking out thousands of dollars to hire a web developer.
Average Customer Support
Within days of deploying my first Vultr instance, I reached out to customer service.
First of all, I want to publicly compliment Vultr on their prompt customer service response time. Not sure if this is typical, but within 10 minutes of submitting my ticket, I received a detailed response from Bryan Hill, the systems administrator. On subsequent communications, Bryan was always prompt to respond.
Anyway, I found some of the help that Bryan was providing as workaround rather than a permanent fix. Without going into too much detail, all Vultr servers running WordPress come with an awesome way to administer and monitor your server from a web browser called Cockpit.
However, the problem was Vultr generates a self-signed certificate for this which Google Chrome doesn’t like. Actually, Google Chrome prevents you from accessing Cockpit all-together.
Bryan’s suggestions included using another browser, which is a viable solution. But I knew many others will encounter this issue after me and go through the same customer service channels. I guess all I wanted was some assurance from him that this issue will be fixed in the future, but I never got that.
In the end, I reused my SSL certificate for my website to prevent the Cockpit SSL error.
As you can probably tell, I’m finding it hard to come up with “real” drawbacks here. Having an average customer support team should never be a drawback, but I’m going to keep it here just to share my experience with you.
Vultr Review Summary
All things considered, I think the pros definitely outweigh the cons with Vultr.
Hands down, Vultr has some of the cheapest hosting plans out there, and when I say cheap, I’m not referring to quality. To date, I’m most satisfied with Vultr when it comes to hosting. In fact, this very website is hosted with Vultr.
The one-click WordPress install is super simple. I currently have three WordPress websites hosted with Vultr.
My hope is that this Vultr review helps you make an educated decision on which hosting provider to choose.
Here’s a step-by-step tutorial of getting started with Vultr. Check the description of the video for some free Vultr credits.
