Managed VPS hosting gives you better performance and higher resources than shared hosting, without you having to deal with the technicalities of server management. It is due to this reason that most of the shared hosting customers looking for scalability choose to go with managed VPS. But with most VPS providers claiming to manage one thing or the other, the borderline between managed and unmanaged VPS gets thinner and confusing at times, and finding the real managed services can be quite challenging. So, here we have tried to separate the wheat from the chaff and come up with a list of 3 cheap managed VPS hosting providers for you:
1. HostingSource
HostingSource offers server management services separately as an upgrade to its unmanaged VPS plans. There are two types of managed plans you can choose from: Advanced Plan beginning from $19/month and Professional Plan beginning from $39/month. So, when you go with their entry level VPS plan of $10/month along with the advanced management services, it adds up to $29 per month. Though this is already a cheap price, you can bring it further down by 10 to 15 percent by prepaying for a period of 6 months or a year. They also offer other paid features like cPanel, SSL and additional IPs.
Specs for the cheapest managed VPS plan from HostingSource:
1 core of CPU
1 GB of RAM
20 GB of storage
3 TB of bandwidth
2. A2 Hosting
Managed VPS hosting from A2 Hosting comes with something they call HostGuard Management under which they take care of everything right from hardware and network to software and security. Their managed VPS is especially designed to support WordPress, Drupal, Prestashop and Joomla, among others. There are three plans to choose from: Power+ starting at $35.63 per month, Prestige+ starting at $52.13 per month and Pinnacle+ starting at $68.63 per month (after a discount of 34%). These packages are seamlessly upgradable meaning that you can switch to a higher plan anytime without any downtime.
Specs for the cheapest managed VPS plan from A2 Hosting:
4 virtual CPUs
2048 MB RAM
75 GB of storage
1000 GB of bandwidth
2 dedicated IPs
CloudFlare CDN
3. Media Temple
Media Temple (complete review here) is a respected name in web hosting industry that has been powering over a million websites. Their managed VPS services come with uptime management, security monitoring, and OS support. You get root access to the server, and their easy-to-use control panel allows you to install 200 odd apps. There are different plans based on the amount of resources they offer (memory, storage and bandwidth). The entry level plan is priced at $50 per month but you get a discount of $100 if you prepay for a year.
Specs for the cheapest managed VPS plan from Media Temple:
1 GB RAM
30 GB of storage
1 TB of bandwidth
So, this was our pick of top 3 providers of cheap managed VPS hosting. Whenever you are comparing managed VPS, don’t forget to make an indepth analysis of what all services are managed by the vendor. Hardware is usually managed by them since they own the physical machine. But what you need to get is something more than that – server uptime and performance, network security, OS and control panel support, and more.
