Hey everyone, in this post I want to share some of my personal experiences with VPS vs fast deploy services. This blog and getneotiler.com are currently both running on a single VPS, but they used to run on two different services. The blog was originally set up as a subdomain, but due to some issues I covered in my guide on running WordPress under Next.js, I ended up switching from a subdomain to a subfolder structure. In this post, I want to talk about something I didn’t cover there: why I chose to go with a VPS, what advantages it brings, and what my experiences were like with different providers. The goal is to give you a realistic picture of what to expect when you’re picking a provider for your next project.
1. VPS or Fast Deploy Service – Which One to Go With?
First things first: I’m not here to trash any company or service. Nothing I say should be taken as a general statement about popular providers. With that disclaimer out of the way, let me get into my experiences.
When I was setting up the landing page for getneotiler.com for the first time, I decided to try a popular fast deploy service – even though I’d never used one before, I’d heard enough about them online. My goal wasn’t really to get the site live as fast as possible; I just wanted to keep costs low, ideally within the free tier limits.
Everything was fine up to that point, but then I noticed something I’d never seen before in all my years of renting VPS servers and shared hosting: things like image optimization services with their own usage limits and counters. I didn’t pay much attention at first, honestly. But then I kept seeing people online posting about insane surprise bills, and I started getting a bit more cautious. Because the whole “that won’t happen to me, my site barely gets any traffic” mindset can collapse overnight – and sure enough, the people who got hit with those bills thought the same thing.
2. Fast Deploy and the “Scalability” Problem
Two things I kept seeing online genuinely made me laugh.
First: fast deploy is a useful thing, I’ll give it that. But it also kind of feels like a product that’s designed to exploit people’s desire to not deal with servers. Because nobody would agree upfront to use a product that might send them a $6,000 bill.
Second: the scalability argument. Honestly, I feel ridiculous even typing the word “scalability” in this context. Why? Because I saw someone on X tell VPS advocates: “What would you do if 1 billion people visited your site? How would you scale?” Read that again. Either people can’t count, or I genuinely don’t know what to say – 1 billion people. If that many people visited this blog of mine, I’d be opening the country’s largest data center by the second month just from ad revenue. Come on.
3. Image Optimization and Other “Interesting” Features
Serverless – and the image optimization that fast deploy services love to pitch as a feature. I’d love for someone to explain to me why this is impressive. The idea is that they optimize the images on your site and serve them faster. Cool. Except I already use WebP on my site. I even built my own WordPress plugin that automatically converts images to WebP the moment they’re uploaded. So why on earth would I pay someone to “count every image they show you and then bill you for it”?
4. Hosting Providers and My Real-World Experiences
After everything I mentioned above, I went back to VPS. But before I get into that, I want to make one quick note: if you just need to host a static site like a landing page, you can do it for free with unlimited traffic on Cloudflare Pages. Just search for “Cloudflare Pages” and you’ll find it.
4.1 Google Compute Engine
I’ll start with Google’s VPS offering. Why? Because I thought “it’s Google, it must be good” and gave it a shot. You enter your payment details, rent a server, and off you go. I didn’t pay anything upfront – I figured I’d pay in a month.
I don’t even need to tell you the prices are astronomical. I think I got an e2-medium instance, somewhere around $26/month if I remember right. But there are one or two things about this kind of serverless hosting that nobody really tells you upfront. That listed price? That’s just for the server itself – the CPU, RAM, storage, etc. What’s less obvious is the traffic cost. If your traffic spikes, Google will charge you more for bandwidth than you even paid for the server. Fair warning.
As for my actual experience: my site got shut down after just 15 days. The reason? Google couldn’t collect the payment from my card within a 1-2 hour window. So what happened? The site went down, the server was immediately handed off to someone else, and even when I paid right away, I couldn’t get my site back. Thankfully I had snapshots saved, so I spun up a new instance in a different region, brought the site back up on an E2, downloaded all my data – and realized it was time to say goodbye to Google.
4.2 Hetzner
Hetzner is a company I’d been following for a while, and we’re now into our second month together – and I genuinely have nothing bad to say. No complaints on pricing or service so far. Price-wise, it’s dramatically cheaper than GCE. A plan that would cost you $30 there runs around $10 at Hetzner, including backups and everything.
On the traffic side, they include 20 TB per month in the plan, and after that it’s $1.20 per additional TB – which is very reasonable. They cover all kinds of needs, including dedicated servers and even colocation if you want to host your own hardware at their facility. Account setup is straightforward – very much in line with that German efficiency reputation. The billing is monthly, they don’t pull the plug on your server because a payment failed within a two-hour window, and the pay-as-you-go model is genuinely great. If you want to start small and scale up as you grow, I’d recommend Hetzner.
4.3 Hostinger
I have to say upfront – this is a solid company. I’ve used them on previous projects and had zero issues. For longer-term plans, they can actually come out cheaper than even Hetzner. And of course, they’re way cheaper than GCE – goes without saying.
The main difference is that Hostinger doesn’t follow Hetzner’s pay-as-you-go model; the lower pricing is tied to longer commitments. Month-to-month, they’re roughly on the same level as Hetzner. They’re more generous with RAM and SSD specs, though the included traffic caps out at 8 TB, which is lower than Hetzner’s 20 TB. On the plus side, they have servers in many locations around the world, which is a nice bonus.
If you’re planning for the longer term and you’re thinking “my project isn’t going to blow up overnight, I just want predictable bills and no surprises,” then you pay upfront and you stop worrying about it. That’s what Hostinger is built for. They offer 4 different VPS tiers, so take that into account. If you’re someone who wants a fixed budget for 2-3 years without any stress.
4.4 Contabo: One I Haven’t Tried Yet, But It’s Got My Attention
Now let’s talk about Contabo. Full disclosure – I haven’t actually used them yet. But after some research, they caught my eye enough that I wanted to include them in this list.
Like Hetzner, they’re a German company (founded in 2003), so they’ve been around the block. On pricing, their entry-level VPS starts at €5.36/month. Hetzner’s entry point is around €4.51, so the difference isn’t huge – they’re roughly neck and neck. One area where Hetzner wins, though, is port speed: Hetzner gives you 1 Gb/s on all VPS plans, while Contabo’s Cloud VPS 20 (which offers more RAM) comes with 300 Mb/s.
So why did it catch my attention?
Multi-currency support – Hetzner only accepts Euro, while Contabo lets you pay in USD, GBP, or EUR. They offer S3-compatible Object Storage, which Hetzner doesn’t have at the VPS level. If your project needs cloud storage integration, that’s a useful plus. Control panel flexibility is also a nice touch: they support cPanel, Plesk, and Webmin across all plans, whereas Hetzner only offers those on dedicated servers. So even on a small VPS, you can use whatever control panel you prefer.
Location coverage is impressive too: 8 different regions – EU, UK, three US regions, Singapore, Japan, and Australia. Hetzner only has 5 locations and nothing in Asia or Australia. If you’re building something for a global audience, that’s a meaningful advantage.
The billing model also makes sense to me. You can pay monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, or annually. Setup fees decrease or disappear entirely with longer commitments. There’s no hourly billing like Hetzner has – so the “surprise bill” risk I mentioned earlier is basically non-existent. No pay-as-you-go, but for people who want a predictable budget, that’s actually a feature, not a bug.
The one thing I couldn’t get a clear answer on is traffic limits. Hetzner includes 20 TB in the plan; Contabo lists it as “unlimited” – which, realistically, can’t be literally true. I wasn’t able to find solid documentation on what the actual limit is.
Who is Contabo a good fit for? If your project is targeting the Asia-Pacific region and you need local infrastructure, if you want to pay in USD or GBP, if you need control panel flexibility, or if you just want a predictable long-term budget – it’s worth a look.
Bottom line: Contabo looks like a solid alternative to Hetzner, especially if you need global reach or multi-currency billing. But since I haven’t actually used them, I can’t give you a definitive recommendation. Everything I wrote here is based on their documentation and comparisons – purely theoretical at this point.
You can check out Contabo here.
5. Conclusion
That was a long one, but I hope it helps you make the right call.
Quick summary: fast deploy services sound attractive, but watch out for hidden costs and surprise bills. If you’re just hosting a static site, free alternatives like Cloudflare Pages are more than enough.
On the VPS side: Google Compute Engine is powerful but expensive – and with its opaque bandwidth costs and ruthless payment policy, I won’t be going back. Hetzner is my favorite so far; it strikes the right balance of price, performance, and transparency. Hostinger is a solid alternative for those who want long-term, predictable costs. Contabo is on my radar – the global locations and more generous specs at a competitive price make it interesting. I might give it a try someday.
At the end of the day, there’s no single answer to “which hosting is the best.” The right choice depends on your project’s scale, your budget, where your audience is, and what you technically need. Everything I’ve shared here is based on my own experience and research – your situation might call for a completely different answer.
If you have any questions, drop them in the comments and let’s talk.
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