10+ Best FREE VPS Hosting Trials (That Actually Work) in 2025

Whether you’re a student experimenting with server administration, a developer testing applications, or a business owner exploring hosting options, free VPS hosting is a smart way to get hands-on experience. But after weeks of extensive research looking for the best free VPS hosting, I’ve come to the conclusion that almost all free services are severely limited, unsecure, or simply not good.

Instead, free VPS trials from top VPS hosts allow you to try out high-performance plans risk-free. But even then, some hosts like to make cancellation a real headache or place a cap on resources until you take out your wallet. I’ve tried dozens of services and l’ll walk you through the best free VPS hosts that give you a real chance to explore their cloud infrastructure.

Kamatera came out on top, thanks to its highly customizable cloud infrastructure and generous 30-day trial with $100 credit. It’s also one of the few hosts that allow you to scale and customize your trial plan as needed. You can get a true feel for what a Kamatera VPS can do for you without paying a cent.

However, all of the hosts listed below offer top-quality VPS hosting and will let you try out a powerful VPS solution risk free. I’ve also included some truly free VPS services at the bottom of the list you can also check out. Keep reading to find the best option for you.

Why We Prefer Free VPS Trials Over Forever-Free VPS Hosting

VPS hosting offers better performance and dedicated server resources, including more RAM, CPU cores, and storage. It’s a lot more expensive and complex to run than shared hosting, so when we see a “free” VPS service, we have to ask how the hosting provider can cover the server costs. In many cases, these services might collect and sell your data or place ads on your site. The service might even be subpar or, at worst, a scam.

While some reputable free VPS hosting services exist – including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Render, and Microsoft Azure – they often come with limitations and complex setups. Most also enforce low resource and usage limits that may force you to upgrade to a paid plan.

If you need a powerful yet beginner- or wallet-friendly VPS service, I highly recommend going for one of our top recommended VPS hosting services with free trials. The best VPS hosts offer stress-free ways to try out their services before you commit.

What We Look For in the Best Free VPS Hosting Trials

When comparing the best hosts offering free VPS trials, I prioritized a number of important features.

• Generous trial resources. There’s not much point in trying out a host’s most basic or – even worse – irrelevant plan. The hosts on this list let you trial their best services and set them up according to your needs. Some even offer generous trial credits from $100 to $300. Most of the free trials on this list also last at least 30 days.
• Easy cancellation. Some hosts like to entice you into a free trial, only to make the cancellation process as difficult as possible. I chose hosts that let you cancel your account easily.
• Security. I looked for hosts with strong security features, including free SSL certificates, proprietary security tools, off-site backups, and more. This ensures you have the best protection available should you choose to sign up for a plan.
• Flexibility. A VPS is highly customizable and your needs can be highly individual. The VPS trials on this list allow you to try out multiple configurations and features without imposing too many limits.
• Fast server setup. Wasting the first few days of your trial waiting for the server to be set up and made available isn’t fun. Hosts that provide a quick set up of your server earned some extra points from me.

Quick Look at Our Top Free VPS Hosts

1. Kamatera: Try Out a Powerful Cloud VPS With a 30-Day Trial and $100 Credit

Kamatera offers a powerful cloud VPS hosting solution that provides access to a cluster of cloud servers across the world. This setup comes with many benefits over traditional VPS, including more reliable performance and the ability to scale your resources instantly.

With such highly customizable servers, I was worried that Kamatera’s free Linux and Windows cloud VPS trial might be tightly controlled, but that wasn’t the case. The 30-day free trial gives you access to a single cloud VPS with $100 in credit (plus 1 TB of storage and outgoing traffic) for an entire month. Even after the trial, the prices are very affordable with flexible hourly or monthly billing.

As long as you stay within this $100 limit, you can scale your resources as you please, and even add or remove optional features such as firewalls, load balancers, and block storage. A word of warning though – if you do end up accidentally going over the $100 credit, you will be charged for the excess. But as long as you don’t go too crazy, you should be able to get a real taste of the powerful cloud VPS Kamatera offers without paying a dime.

Features

• Great performance. Kamatera’s cloud VPS use powerful Intel Xeon Platinum and Cascade processors, providing your site with impressive speeds.
• Designated account manager. During the length of the trial, you’ll get access to a designated account manager who will answer any questions you may have about Kamatera’s service. You even get technical advice about the ideal VPS configuration for your needs.
• Fast server setup. Upon signing up, your server will be set up and available within a minute.
• 24/7 technical support. The free trial includes access to Kamatera’s technical support team, which is available through phone, email, and tickets.

Read our full Kamatera review for more information.

2. IONOS: 30-Day VPS Money-Back Guarantee for Cheap Unmanaged VPS Plans

If you’re looking for one of the cheapest self-managed solutions on the market, IONOS offers VPS plans starting at just $2.00. Furthermore, you’ll benefit from a 30-day money-back guarantee as a new customer.

While IONOS is certainly a budget solution, it still offered good performance and uptime in our tests. In addition, you’ll get some nice premium features: you can configure your firewall policies, create an image of your VPS at any time, and request a dedicated personal consultant to help answer any queries.

That said, it can be hard to get in touch with your advisor at times, and they won’t help you manage your server. To get the most value out of IONOS, you’ll need to know how to configure, optimize, and maintain a VPS server.

Features

• Unlimited traffic. All IONOS servers allow for unlimited traffic up to 1 Gbit/s – you’ll never reach a cap or have to pay overage fees.
• Secure cloud backups. For an added fee, you can purchase Acronis cloud backup storage with integrated malware protection and robust encryption. You can take full or incremental backups.
• Choice of Operating Systems. IONOS VPS plans offer a wide range of OS choices, including Windows (2019 or 2022) and the latest versions of AlmaLinux, Debian, Rocky Linux, and Ubuntu.
• Manage your VPS on the go. IONOS is one of the few VPS hosts with a responsive and functional mobile app. You can manage your servers, monitor performance, pay invoices, and more.

Learn more about IONOS in our comprehensive review.

3. ScalaHosting: Flexible Managed VPS With an “Anytime” Money-Back Guarantee

ScalaHosting offers customizable managed VPS plans with an impressive “anytime” money-back guarantee. This means that you can request a refund at any time, and you’ll get money back for the unused portion of your contract. Unfortunately, ScalaHosting doesn’t technically offer a free trial, but it does have a 30-day money-back guarantee. It’s a great way to try its services before committing to a plan.

As part of your service, you’ll get the usual perks of VPS management. A support team will set up your VPS, optimize its performance, update it with the latest patches, perform daily remote backups, monitor its uptime, and scan for malware. Just keep in mind that while unmanaged VPS plans include Linux and Windows options, managed plans come with Rocky Linux by default.

Although you have the choice of paying for the popular cPanel if you wish, ScalaHosting provides its cPanel alternative, SPanel, for free. It makes VPS management a breeze and you can have unlimited accounts without incurring an extra cost. All in all, ScalaHosting is perfect for beginners – it’s easy to work with and you can get a refund at any time.

Features

• Scalable resources. You can scale your resources up or down at any time. However, this does require a reboot of your server.
• Self-managed VPS. There’s also the option of unmanaged VPS. While you lose all the benefits of managed VPS, you do gain root access, allowing for a lot more customizability.
• SShield security. If you choose the free SPanel, you also get SShield security for free. This is an AI solution that monitors your server, blocking web attacks and notifying you of any vulnerabilities.
• Unlimited website migration. With managed VPS, ScalaHosting will migrate an unlimited amount of websites to its hosting service.

Read more about ScalaHosting’s VPS features in our expert review.

4. DigitalOcean: Generous Free 60-Day Trial With $200 in Credits

Like Google Cloud and AWS, DigitalOcean offers powerful cloud services – but costs much less. It gives customers a generous 60-day trial with $200 in credits so you can test out its Droplets infrastructure. However, like ScalaHosting’s managed VPS plans, DigitalOcean only offers Linux-based hosting services.

New startups can take advantage of its Hatch developer program. The program provides three free months of free high-performance VPS instances, with a discount for a full year. On top of these free and discounted plans, you can consult with DigitalOcean’s engineers and gain access to the Marketplace, where you can put your innovations in front of other developers.

DigitalOcean can carry a steep learning curve, as its services are unmanaged. In my opinion, however, DigitalOcean is definitely more user-friendly than the big players it’s competing against – including Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, and Oracle. But if you’re a complete beginner, you can opt for a DigitalOcean managed service through Cloudways or add managed services to a Kamatera or ScalaHosting VPS plan.

Features

• High usage limits. You can run up to 10 Basic Droplets or 15 static sites on your free trial – just watch your costs. Once your free $200 DigitalOcean trial credit runs out, you’ll need to pay for any additional usage even if you’re still within the 60-day trial period.
• 99.99% uptime guarantee. DigitalOcean offers one of the highest SLAs, covering you for downtime and ensuring top reliability. You can test out its uptime rate using free tools like UptimeRobot during your free trial or even set up a DigitalOcean uptime monitor.
• Range of “building block” services. DigitalOcean offers many complementary cloud services, including managed Kubernetes, managed database plans, an App Platform, load balancers, security (firewall, DDoS protection), block/object storage, and more.
• DigitalOcean Marketplace. You can install 300+ popular free and paid plugins, extensions, and add-ons in one click – including CMSs and frameworks to create your site/app.

Read our full DigitalOcean review to learn more about Droplets.

5. Cloudways: 3-Day Trial for Managed Services on the Biggest Cloud Platforms

Rather than providing web hosting services on its own servers, Cloudways instead acts as a management service for some of the biggest cloud hosts, such as Google Cloud, AWS, and its parent company, DigitalOcean. Despite being a third party, you can directly purchase various hosting plans from multiple hosts through Cloudways. It’s a great option if you’re looking for high-performance VPS hosting but don’t have the know-how or time to configure your server.

You’ll never need to engage directly with the infrastructure provider. Instead, you can utilize the user-friendly Cloudways platform to choose your cloud provider, pick server resources, and oversee your server instances. Cloudways only supports Linux-based OSs, so I’d suggest trying Kamatera or ScalaHosting if you’re looking for Windows support.

Cloudways does offer a 3-day free trial – it’s very short, but no credit card is required to sign up and you get full access to support. However, outside of the trial, standard prices can be more expensive than most of the other hosts on my list, depending on the provider and plan resources you choose.

Features

• Easy WordPress installation. Cloudways has software that can automatically install multiple instances of WordPress for you on a single server. From there, you’ll get Cloudways’ pre-optimized hosting stack for top WordPress performance.
• Dedicated staging environment. You can launch a dedicated staging area to test site changes and new plugins without affecting your live site. Once you’re ready, you can push these changes to the live site with a single click.
• Premium CDN. On all Cloudways plans, you can add on the premium Cloudflare Enterprise CDN, which significantly increases the performance of your site across the globe. Though costing extra, it offers image and mobile optimization as well as an additional layer of security.
• 24/7/365 support with guaranteed response times. Cloudways Standard support guarantees a response within 12 hours to a support ticket and 3 hours for a high-priority ticket. Premium support includes a private Slack channel and phone support with a response time of 5 minutes. If Cloudways doesn’t meet these SLA promises, you’ll be entitled to service credits.

For more information, read our expert Cloudways review.

6. InterServer: Low-Cost Month-to-Month VPS Plans With Fixed Pricing

InterServer doesn’t have a free trial or a money-back guarantee for its VPS hosting. (I can sense your confusion.) But here’s why it still earns a place on my list: what it does offer is low-cost cloud VPS hosting with flat fee pricing not subject to renewal fees. This means that what you pay now will be what you’ll pay for the lifespan of your InterServer plan. The cheapest plan is only $3.00/month.

InterServer’s plans start with 1 vCPU core (1 slice) of a Linux or SSD storage VPS or 1 vCPU (2 slices) of a Windows VPS, up to 16 vCPUs (32 slices). When you buy 8 slices or more, InterServer will include free managed support of your server, though these managed services are on the basic side and don’t include control panel troubleshooting.

InterServer doesn’t offer any contracts or plans longer than a month, which means that no high renewal fees will be coming your way. And that makes the price difference between InterServer and most other VPS hosts out there even greater, as their renewal fees can skyrocket. Is InterServer free? No. But budget-friendly? Definitely.

Features

• Flexible customization. While you won’t have the pick of resources, you’ll have 16 options for your OS, including CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu. There are also three choices for your control panel – cPanel, Plesk, or Webuzo, plus hundreds of apps that you can install.
• Serious security. InterServer uses the KVM, Openvz, Virtuozzo and Hyper-v platforms to isolate your server from outside threats. These well-established and highly regarded security measures keep malicious attacks at bay.
• Self-healing hardware. An AI-powered backup system detects any glitches in the hardware and automatically transfers your site to another node within the server. This prevents any issues on the server side from interfering with your site’s performance.
• 99.9% uptime. InterServer’s performance is backed up by an uptime SLA. You’ll be compensated should it not meet this target. In general, though, InterServer’s uptime is very reliable. In our tests, InterServer had a solid 100% uptime over a few weeks.

Read our expert InterServer review for more pros and cons.

Notable Web Hosts With Free VPS Hosting Plans

If you’re looking for completely free VPS hosting, look no further. These hosts offer forever-free hosting – but do note that their free services are unmanaged and limited. They may not suit you if you’re not familiar with maintaining your own server or need a high-performance plan.

7. Render

If you’re a hobbyist or want to start a small project, Render may just be the free hosting service you’re looking for. The free tier includes some useful freebies, including a forever-free Redis cache of up to 25 MB and 50 connections, as well as a PostgreSQL free trial for up to 30 days featuring 0.1 vCPU, 256 MB RAM, and 1 GB of storage.

Other useful features include auto backups, unlimited inbound bandwidth, DDoS protection, and email support. While you can host and automatically deploy static sites via Git for free, its free plan is extremely limited. You’ll only get 512 MB RAM, 0.1 vCPU, and 100 GB bandwidth/month, as well as SSD storage starting at $0.25 GB/month. You can also always upgrade to a paid plan if you need more resources or features.

8. Oracle

Oracle Cloud offers more than 20 of its cloud VM services at no cost. This forever-free tier can save you a lot of money, as long as you don’t need anything too complex. Included in the tier are two 20 GB databases, 200 GB block storage with 10 GB object storage, 10 TB outbound transfer per month, and $300 in credits for 30 days to try even more Oracle features.

In addition to free services, Oracle also offers tutorials and labs, making it ideal for students that want to learn cloud infrastructure at little to no cost. Even experienced users may need them, as Oracle is not the most beginner-friendly VPS hosting provider. Users often find it has a steep learning curve and is more complex than it needs to be.

9. Microsoft Azure

Like AWS, Microsoft Azure offers a free Virtual Machine (VM) trial for both Windows and Linux servers. However, Microsoft’s trial extends to a full year, so does it technically count as free VPS hosting? I think so! There’s a 750 hour monthly limit across your servers – that’s 6 hours more than the total number of hours in a 31-day month. As a bonus, you also get a $200 credit that you can use for other Azure products.

Microsoft’s services are mainly cloud-based and unmanaged. Like many other cloud-based services, you can take advantage of on-demand usage and switch your server on and off as needed. If you’re a student, you can also sign up for a recurring annual $100 credit to use on Azure hosting and other products.

10. Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon offers a variety of free trials, short-term free plans, and forever-free services. You can take advantage of AWS’ Lightsail extended 3-month free trial (with up to 750 hours of usage per month) for both Linux and Windows servers. These free plans are generous, but keep in mind that you’ll need to know your way around a server as AWS limits free support.

If you want to build a serverless app, AWS offers forever-free services that you can access through its Free Tier service, including Lambda and DynamoDB. If you exceed the resource limits, you’ll incur charges based on AWS’ standard pricing, so make sure that you keep track of your account resources during your free trial.

11. Google Cloud

Google Cloud has two free tiers. As a new signup, you can use over 20 of its products free for 90 days with $300 in credits. All you need is your Google account. You won’t be charged unless you decide to prepay or purchase a plan before your trial ends. If you do that, any remaining credits are still yours to spend. But compared to the other trials on my list, Google Cloud’s free vCPU limits might be too limiting to truly get any use outside of testing an app.

Like Digital Ocean’s Hatch program, Google Cloud also offers a number of free credits to developer startups. Seed to series A startups can apply to receive $350,000 in credits for 12 months, while B+ level startups can get $200,000 in credits. You’ll also have access to webinars, special events, partnerships with other startups, additional Google products, and technical support.

12. IBM Cloud

IBM Cloud offers a free Lite plan with access to over 40 forever-free products. You’ll only pay for what you use outside the free tier. And there’s no time limit, so you can use it free forever. It’s designed for testing, learning, and small workloads, making it a solid option for developers exploring enterprise-grade infrastructure without upfront costs.

However, the free tier comes with strict limitations, including reduced resources. You’re only allowed one user, and you’ll only receive 1 vCPU with 1 GB of storage. This makes it less suitable for scaling projects beyond experimentation. Like Oracle, it’s great for learning what the cloud has to offer, but for serious developers, you may want to look elsewhere.

Find the Best VPS Trial or Free Plan for You

So, which free VPS host is best for you? It depends on your needs. If you’re a developer who needs fully customizable servers that can be scaled up or down on short notice, I recommend Kamatera. It offers a flexible 30-day cloud VPS hosting trial with $100 free credit and expert assistance throughout the process.

If you’re looking for the cheapest option for unmanaged VPS, check out IONOS. You’ll get 30 days to try it out, and if it meets your expectations, you’ll pay less than you would with many other alternatives.

When you need stress-free hosting, try out ScalaHosting’s managed cloud VPS plans. On top of a 30-day money-back guarantee, it offers an anytime money-back guarantee and will refund you for any unused services.

FAQ

What is the best VPS service?

The best VPS service for you depends on your particular needs. Are you a beginner to VPS? In that case, I’d recommend ScalaHosting, which offers managed service with good support. However, if you’re a developer, Kamatera would be a better fit due to its customizability and affordability. You can save a lot, but make sure you know your way around a server before you start planning that vacation.

How can I get a free VPS without a credit card?

Cloudways lets you sign up for its 3-day trial without a credit card. That said, you won’t be able to find a host that offers “forever-free” VPS hosting that isn’t a scam or limited to the point that it’s almost useless. Many of the options covered in our list of the top hosts with free VPS trials are affordable to those on a tight budget and either offer free trials, a money-back guarantee, or both.

How is VPS hosting better than shared hosting?

VPS allows for a lot more customization and flexibility. You can scale your resources to your exact needs and install whichever OS and software best suits your needs. VPS is also generally more secure and reliable, as you’re kept isolated from other users on the same server. Not certain if a VPS is the best choice for you? Every VPS host on our top 10 list allows you to test them out without any risk.

Why is VPS so expensive?

VPS is a more sophisticated technology than shared hosting, offering greater levels of control and performance. This leads to an increase in price. However, VPSs don’t have to be expensive – IONOS offers VPS instances at very low prices. Or, if you’d prefer cheaper shared hosting, check out our list of the top web hosts in 2025.