Vultr.com review

First impression

Vultr is a cloud specialist firm founded in 2014 by David Aninowsky. It aims to enable developers and businesses by making it easy to deploy infrastructure with their high-speed cloud infrastructure. They offer a variety of cloud services and products that encompass automated cloud infrastructure, a vast range of NVIDIA GPUs, virtual CPUs, Bare Metal Servers, Kubernetes, Cloud Storage, and networking.

Trial Period

There is no free trial for Vultr's offerings. However, they do offer a Free Tier Programme for eligible candidates, and it is meant to support digital entrepreneurs and developers. It provides high-performance cloud computing resources of 1vCPU, 512MB RAM, 10GB SSD, and an IPv4 Address free for development and testing of solutions.

Besides this, it can be pointed out that they don't have a refund policy for their other products.

Billing Cycle

The hourly rate is charged on each server in your Vultr account up to the monthly billing limit. What they do is divide the monthly price by 672 hours (28 days' worth of hours). If your server is running for more than 672 hours in a calendar month, the billing is done at the monthly fixed rate. They bill you the amount you've accumulated on the 1st of the month.

Keep in mind that stopped instances will incur a cost since they still reserve dedicated system resources like RAM, SSD disk space, IP aliases, and vCPUs.

Accepted payment methods are Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, JCB, BitPay (BTC, BCH, ETH, DOGE, PAX, BUSD, LTC, USDC, GUSD), Alipay, UnionPay, and PayPal.

Control Panel

In the context of Control Panels, Vultr is aware that everyone has his or her own preference, and therefore they support one of the largest Control Panel lineups. The client is able to use Ajenti, a free, open-source control panel to use on a cloud server, CentOS Web Panel, the highly used cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk for Windows users, Hestia Control Panel (a free, open-source web hosting control panel designed especially for Debian and Ubuntu servers with web, email, database, and DNS administration features), VestaCP, Virtualmin, and Webmin.

Limits

Their Optimized Cloud Compute VMs (Virtual Machines) are available in a wide range, starting with 1 vCPU, 0.5 GB RAM, 0.50 TB Bandwidth, and 10 GB standard SSD storage, with last-generation Intel CPUs in their "The Regular Performance Plan" VMs. The range extends all the way to 12 vCPUs, 48 GB RAM, 8 TB Bandwidth, and 768 GB NVMe storage, with 3GHz+ Intel Xeon CPUs on the "High Frequency" plan VMs. A great configuration for massive nonrelational databases, like Cassandra or MongoDB, and high-frequency online transaction processing (OLTP).

Website Builder

Vultr does not have website builders as their primary focus is Cloud Computing and not traditional hosting services.

Security

In Cloud Instance usage, security is the top priority to ensure applications and data are protected from any form of attack. Besides configurable firewall rules on each server, including UFW, Firewalld, and iptables, there is also DDoS protection (distributed denial-of-service) with 10Gbps mitigation per instance and protection on all IPv4 addresses assigned. Automatic backup through Snapshot is also provided but needs to be activated by the user.

Apart from that, all instances of Vultr support both SSH Keys and Passwords as login credentials, where SSH Keys are more secure in that only the host machine carrying an authorized SSH key can gain access to log in to the server's SSH console. Password Rotation can be enforced by the server administrators with a specified period for system users to reset the password to desired strength in order to continue the usage of the server.

OS

As one of the leading cloud computing services in the world, Vultr offers various Operating Systems based on the requirements of businesses and developers. There are options from Alma Linux, Alpine Linux, Arch Linux, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Fedora CoreOS, Flatcar Container Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Rocky Linux, Ubuntu, Windows, and Windows Core.

Support

Support is given through Support Tickets, which are initiated in login or by contacting support@vultr.com via email. No telephone support, unfortunately. They do offer 100% Node and Network uptime, though, so you shouldn't really need to make use of it. My own experience was that tickets I had initiated were replied to in under 30 minutes by courteous, competent agents.

Conclusion

Not the cheapest, Vultr is nevertheless a good choice for anyone seeking a cloud computing host with perfect uptime and worldwide presence. It is particularly ideal for eCommerce companies that require scalable services as they expand.