About BestUSAVPS

A reference site for people choosing a VPS with a datacenter in the United States. This page explains where the numbers come from, how pages are ranked, and what the site does not do.

What the site is for

Most VPS comparison pages are written for a global audience, and the cheapest plan in the table is often only sold in Germany or Finland. BestUSAVPS covers providers with US datacenters and compares them at the sizes most small projects actually buy, 1 to 8 GB of memory paid month to month, with the location, the transfer allowance and the billing rules made explicit. The site is maintained by a small editorial team and is published under the BestUSAVPS name rather than an individual byline.

Where the numbers come from

Every price, plan specification and location on a page that carries a "Sources" section was read from the provider's own plan page or public API on the day shown in that section. Where a provider exposes an API without authentication (Hetzner's price API, Vultr's plans and regions endpoints, Linode's types endpoint), the API is preferred over the marketing page. Where the price on a page is a first-term promotion, the page says what it renews at, or says that the renewal price was not shown. Where we could not verify a number, the page says so or leaves it out.

Pages are updated in order of how much search traffic they receive. Older pages that have not yet been through this process may still contain earlier claims, including benchmark figures and first-person testing accounts that we are removing as each page is revised. A page's "Updated" date and its Sources section tell you which standard it was written to.

How rankings are decided

Comparison pages state their ranking rule before the data is collected, and the rule is chosen to fit the page's question rather than to fit a provider. A page about the cheapest 2 GB server in a US datacenter ranks by monthly list price at 2 GB in a US location; a page about VPN hosting ranks by transfer allowance per dollar; a page about hourly test servers excludes providers that bill monthly only. Two rules follow from this. A provider that wins on one page will often lose on another, and that is expected. And a provider is never placed first on a page whose ranking rule it does not win, whether or not it pays a commission.

What the site does not do

  • No benchmark measurements of our own. Revised pages contain no CPU, disk or network figures that we measured, because we do not run a standing test fleet and would not be able to keep such figures current across dozens of providers. Where a provider publishes specifications (port speed, storage type, CPU family), pages quote them and say so.
  • No first-person testing accounts. Revised pages do not describe months of personal use, support tickets we filed, or servers we rented. Operational advice on the site is drawn from provider documentation and standard system administration practice, and is written as guidance rather than as testimony.
  • No invented discounts. Deal pages list only prices and promotions visible on the provider's site on the day of the update.

Affiliate links and independence

BestUSAVPS earns a commission when a reader buys through some of the provider links on the site. Those links are marked with rel="sponsored", carry a disclosure line next to the first one on each page, and are listed in the affiliate disclosure. Links to a provider's own documentation, price pages and FAQs, which are what the Sources sections cite, are plain links. Commission does not change a page's ranking rule or the numbers in its tables; it changes which provider's button appears on a page, and only on pages where that provider wins the page's rule.

Corrections

If a price, plan or location on this site is wrong, or a provider's rules have changed, use the contact page and name the page. Corrections that check out are applied to the page and its Sources section is updated with the date.

What the site covers