I’ve been running EVLBOX VPS for a while now, and honestly they’ve been great. Small team, but every time I’ve hit an issue they’ve been active on Discord and had me fixed up the same day. That last part is the whole reason I’m writing this.

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Why a VPS instead of the alternatives

Versus shared hosting: you get root. That’s the difference. On shared hosting you get whatever PHP version and whatever modules the host decided on, and you cannot install anything. On a VPS you install what you want, run Docker, open the ports you need, and nobody else’s traffic spike takes your site down.

Versus running it at home: I do both, and they solve different problems. My old PC running Proxmox is great for media and anything that only needs to work inside my house. But a home box means your residential IP, your power bill, your upload speed, and your internet going down at 2am while you’re asleep. Anything that other people need to reach reliably belongs on a VPS.

Versus a big cloud provider: if you can read a pricing calculator and predict your bill, you don’t need one. AWS and friends are priced for companies with a procurement department. A flat monthly VPS from a small host is cheaper and you’ll never get a surprise invoice for egress.

What I actually run on it

Game servers are the obvious one, and it’s where a VPS earns its money — Project Zomboid, Palworld, Valheim, Minecraft. A dedicated box you control means real mod support, actual config file access, and no host telling you which plugins you’re allowed to run.

Beyond that: small sites and side projects, a reverse proxy sitting in front of several services, and anything that needs to be up when my house internet isn’t.

If you’re exposing services to the open internet, lock them down properly — I went through that with Traefik and IP allow-listing for Jellyfin and Emby.

What to actually look for in a VPS host

Speaking generally, because this applies whoever you go with:

• Support that answers. The most important spec and the one nobody lists. A slightly slower box with a host who replies in an hour beats a faster box with a ticket system that answers in three days. This is the thing I’d pay a premium for now.
• NVMe over spinning disks. Non-negotiable for anything database-backed. A game server loading a big world map on a slow disk is genuinely painful.
• Real RAM, not “burstable”. If the plan is vague about how much memory is actually guaranteed, assume the worst number.
• Full root access and your choice of OS. If you can’t reinstall to a clean Debian yourself from a panel, keep looking.
• Bandwidth you can understand. Look for a plain monthly allowance, not per-GB pricing you have to model in advance.
• Location. For game servers this matters more than the CPU. Pick the datacenter nearest your players, not the cheapest one on the list.

Where I landed

The support thing is what keeps me there. I’m not a sysadmin by trade — I break things, and when I break something at an awkward hour I need an actual human rather than a knowledge base article. Being able to describe a problem in Discord and get a real answer the same day is worth more to me than a slightly better benchmark.

If you’re hunting for affordable VPS hosting with real people behind it, they’re worth a look:

👉 EVLBOX VPS Services
👉 My affiliate link (helps me out if you use it): EVLBOX VPS Affiliate Link

Use TOOBROKE20 at checkout for 20% off.

Affiliate disclosure: the second link pays me a commission at no extra cost to you. I was using and paying for this host before there was an affiliate program — see my affiliate disclosure.