Managed vs Unmanaged VPS
An unmanaged VPS is cheap because you do all the work. A managed one costs more because someone else does. There’s also a third option many businesses miss: keep the cheap VPS and add expert management on top.
Ask an engineer which fits
Free adviceWhich should you choose?
you have Linux skills in-house, time to patch and monitor, and the server isn’t business-critical at 3 AM.
the server earns money, you don’t have a sysadmin on call 24/7, or security and backups must be done properly.
Keep the low-cost VPS from Hetzner, DigitalOcean or AWS, and add our management: you get the price of unmanaged with the care of managed.
Managed VPS / server vs Unmanaged VPS at a glance.
| Managed VPS / server | Unmanaged VPS | |
|---|---|---|
| OS updates & security patches | You | Provider / us |
| Firewall & hardening | You | Provider / us |
| Backups & restore tests | You | Provider / us |
| 24/7 monitoring & alerts | You (if set up) | Included |
| Fixing outages | You, whenever it happens | Engineers on call |
| Monthly cost | Lowest | Higher |
| Hidden cost | Your time and risk | None |
Features and licensing change; check the vendor’s current pages before buying. We keep up with them on every server we manage.
The differences you’ll notice.
Managed vs Unmanaged VPS: questions.
Monitoring, patching, hardening, backups with test restores, performance tuning and incident response, 24/7.
Yes: Hetzner, DigitalOcean, AWS, Vultr, Linode, OVH, Contabo and others.
If the server matters to your business, usually yes: a single outage or hack costs more than a year of management.
Yes. It’s your server; we document every change.