Rankfile

Top 5 cheapest VPS hosting providers in the UK

Five UK virtual servers ranked on what they cost to run for a year, not what the first month advertises. Every price below is the renewal price including VAT, and every speed figure comes from the same benchmark run on the smallest plan each host sells.

Last updated · 5 options compared

#1

Nine Fields

Cheapest on paper, annual up front

Best Value
7.4/10

The lowest headline figure in the test, with the catch stated plainly: you pay twelve months in advance. Fine for something you know you are keeping, awkward for anything you are still deciding about.

Features

  • 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 20 GB NVMe
  • 1 TB transfer
Price
£2.60/mo
Money-back guarantee
7 days
See the plans

Annual billing only — the monthly price shown is the yearly total divided by twelve

#2

Kestrel VPS

Yes
8.9/10

The cheapest server in the test that we would still put a real site on. One core and a gigabyte of memory goes further than it sounds when the storage is NVMe and the network is not oversold.

Features

  • 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 25 GB NVMe
  • 2 TB transfer
  • Weekly snapshots
Price
£2.75/mo
Money-back guarantee
7 days
Country
United Kingdom
Founded
2019
See Kestrel plans
#3

Brackenhost

Cheap, and honest about what that means

Yes
7.8/10

A no-frills box with a good price and a plain warning on its own signup page that backups are your problem. We would rather that than a promise nobody keeps.

Features

  • 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 30 GB SSD
  • 2 TB transfer
Price
£3.20/mo
See Brackenhost plans
#4

Thornbury Cloud

Editor's Choice
9.1/10

A pound more than the cheapest and a noticeably better machine: two cores, hourly billing, and the fastest median response of anything in this price bracket.

Features

  • 2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe
  • 3 TB transfer
  • Hourly billing, no minimum term
Price
£3.50/mo
Money-back guarantee
14 days
Country
United Kingdom
Founded
2014
See Thornbury plans
#5

Marlow Systems

The one with real humans on support

Yes
8.4/10

Not the cheapest line on the page, but the only host in the test where a support ticket at eleven at night was answered by somebody who read it.

Features

  • 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 60 GB NVMe
  • 4 TB transfer
  • Daily backups, 14-day retention
Price
£6.20/mo
Money-back guarantee
30 days
See Marlow plans

How we ranked them

We rented the entry plan from each host at retail, ran the same benchmark script for seven days, and recorded the renewal price rather than the promotional one. Cheap is only cheap if it stays cheap in month thirteen.

Speed is a median of hourly runs, not a best case. Uptime is what we measured over the week, which is too short to be a guarantee and long enough to catch a host having a bad time.

Common questions

Is the cheapest VPS ever the right choice?
If the workload is a side project, a staging site or a bot that nobody notices when it restarts, yes. If it takes payments, buy the tier above the cheapest — the difference is usually a few pounds a month and it buys you a second core and somebody to answer the phone.
Does the data centre location matter if my visitors are in the UK?
Less than it used to for page loads, and more than you would think for latency-sensitive work. London and Manchester both keep round trips inside the UK; a cheap server in another country can add fifteen to thirty milliseconds to every database call your application makes.
What is the difference between a VPS and shared hosting?
A VPS gives you a slice of a machine with your own operating system and root access, which means you can install anything and you are responsible for everything. Shared hosting hands you a control panel and takes the responsibility back. Neither is better; they are different jobs.
Are these prices with or without VAT?
With. UK hosts often advertise excluding VAT, which makes a £3.99 plan cost £4.79 at the till. The figures in the table are what leaves your account.