About VPS.app

VPS.app is an independent site about VPS hosting and self-hosting. The premise is simple: every review here is based on a server actually rented and tested — not on a vendor's spec sheet, and not rewritten from someone else's review. If a number appears on this site, it came off a real box.

Who's behind it

VPS.app is written by one person — a developer who has spent years renting, breaking and re-deploying servers across Hetzner, Vultr, DigitalOcean, BandwagonHost and others, for self-hosted apps, side projects, and deployments that have to stay fast from mainland China. I started this site because most "best VPS" articles are clearly written by people who never logged into the servers they recommend. I wanted one that wasn't.

I write under the handle root rather than a personal byline, but it's a single, consistent voice — the testing, the writing, and the opinions are all mine.

How I test

When I review a provider, I spin up a real instance and run the same suite on every one, so the numbers are comparable:

• yabs.sh and fio for CPU and disk throughput / IOPS
• iperf3 for network speed to multiple global endpoints
• For anything aimed at a China audience: NextTrace return-route tracing plus latency probes from 80+ points across China Telecom, Unicom and Mobile
• Where it matters, a real app deployment (e.g. Nextcloud) to test the box under a realistic load, not just synthetic benchmarks

The raw numbers get published, including the unflattering ones. Where I haven't finished testing a provider yet, you'll see that section marked as pending rather than filled with a guess. A benchmark I didn't run is not a benchmark I'll invent.

How this site makes money

Some links here are affiliate links: if you sign up through one, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. That never changes a verdict. I recommend the cheaper option — or the one that pays me nothing, like Hetzner — whenever it's genuinely the better pick, and I say so plainly in the article. The entire value of a review site is that you can trust the recommendation; the day that stops being true, none of this works.

Get in touch

Spotted an error, want a specific provider tested, or want to suggest a comparison? Email [email protected].