When it comes to hosting, there are a wide variety of options currently available on the internet, such as shared web hosting, containers, virtual machines, cloud hosting, hybrid servers, and dedicated servers. Of course, this is a small list compared to the entirety of available options. But the purpose of today’s article is not to discuss such details, but to take a step back and look at a broad image of the future of virtualized hosting with a fundamental question: Is there such a thing as free VPS hosting?
Free Trials
Here we can include some of the most popular cloud hosting providers, such as Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services. They offer free cloud hosting for a limited period of time (usually 30 or 90 days), but you are required to input a valid credit card on which they block or charge an amount of money equivalent with the price of the service, which can be later released if you are not satisfied with the service. But sometimes the process of getting your money back is not that easy, and most users that want a free service don’t want to pay for it anyway. They can also come with other strings attached, such as a renewable subscription on which the user is not notified about until their card gets charged. They rely on the fact that from the majority of users that input their card, there are bound to be a few who will forget about the subscription and not check their card statements until it is too late to ask for a refund if that option is even available.
Limited performance
Some cloud hosting providers offer free, for a limited period of time, cloud hosting instances or VPS on older or low-performance hardware, that can’t be sold anyways to paying customers. This is done mostly to get a taste of their services, but are seldom good enough to be used as a permanent solution, as they have limited software use, old technology, inexistent or limited support or just bad network performance that won’t let you use the service on a 100% availability.
Scam services
Every company lives and breathes marketing today, especially when working with a global market of customers. Some companies offer promotional trial VPS services hoping on a word of mouth marketing campaigns, others offer it in the hopes that you will continue to use their services after the trial expires, while the last category, but not the least important, offers free services in the hopes to gather personal data to either misuse it, to sell it to spam providers, or to spam you themselves with unrelated products or services. And even after you provide the personal data to register, that doesn’t guarantee they will ever deliver that service.
Any professional user that relies on a digital service to work in their benefit will most likely be turned off by such details as a free VPS as they are way too unreliable or 100% have hidden motives behind a free service.
So our advice in case you want a professional service with reliable support and high availability, skip ahead the free VPS offers you find on the internet and go directly for the paid one. You will not regret it for sure!