Time4VPS review

The idea of Time4VPS began its life as a division of “Interneto Vizija” (Lithuania’s web hosting company founded in 2003) and they started writing their own success story in 2012. Learning from its parent company’s invaluable experience of serving more than 100,000 customers all over Europe, Time4VPS became a brand name on its own, especially in its homeland.

Their main office is situated in Vilnius (Lithuania) as well as their enterprise-grade tier 3 data center. We should add that the “About” section of Time4VPS’s website is well-written and offers a great insight into the technology they utilize, their network, data centers and the company itself. Two out of four of these sections are filled with photos of Time4VPS’s team, main office and data center, which is a fine touch, since it allows their potential users to get better acquainted with the future home of their website.

• Interested in Time4VPS? Check out the website here

Time4VPS’s blog matches their website in style, in the sense that it features the same photo of people that seem awfully happy about their job (that is their technical team, we suppose). The blog provides about forty articles on various hosting-related topics aimed at all who are interested. The new one appears to come out every once in a while, which is (being a bit more specific) once in two months.

They are also currently present on two social media sites (Facebook and Twitter) and both accounts feel alive and kicking.

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Plans and pricing

If there is something that Time4VPS has no shortage of, that's affordable Linux-based VPS packages (like they say) for those who need more than a standard. The cheapest plan "Linux 2" starts at €1.99 ($2.37) per month and implies you’ll be getting Intel Gold 6246 (CPU: 1x2.6 GHz), 2GB of RAM, 20GB of storage (RAID protected SSD), 2TB of bandwidth and free backups (you can choose to get them on a weekly or a daily basis). All in all, it looks like a fair deal for a given price, more so if you decide to subscribe for a year and get 50% off on the whole package.

In any case, there are eight different-sized packages ranging from €1.99 ($2.37) to €128.99 ($153.89) per month, so there is something for everyone. If the one you choose doesn’t live up to your expectations, worry not, for all of them include a rather standard 30-day money-back guarantee.

Time4VPS accepts payment via credit cards, bank transfer, PayPal, AliPay, WebMoney, bitcoin and altcoins, which is quite a number of options.

Ease of use

Since all of Time4VPS’s hosting packages are well-presented, deciding which one to go with shouldn’t be a trouble. If you scroll just a bit, you’ll notice an option to download a presentation about their plans in PDF. However, while it brings together all the information about their hosting packages you can find by looking around Time4VPS’s website, it doesn’t offer anything more than this.

After opting for the best-fit plan, you’ll proceed to decide on a billing cycle (monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, annual or biennial one) and consider to include a few components (backups, faster SSD storage or 1 Gbps port speed) and a handful of add-ons, all for a pretty penny. If you are keen on having cPanel, Plesk or DirectAdmin (which is available with new VPS only) as your control panel, this is a place to get it. However, pricing for the popular user-friendly cPanel ranges (depending on the number of accounts supported) from €14.99 ($17.85) up to €39.99 ($47.63) for each month if you decide on a monthly billing cycle. As expected, the price goes down as the billing period lengthens.

After this, you’ll proceed to fill in your personal data, create a password and choose whether you want to enable 2FA (two-factor authentication) and yes, you better do it. In addition to this, you can choose to subscribe for news and updates from Time4VPS and pass a little image verification (hopefully not having to refresh the image to the end of time before guessing the word, like we did somehow). To wrap things up you’ll proceed to check-out, submit the payment and enter your new server, after which you’ll get further instructions on what to do next.

Although cinnabar red is slightly hard on the eyes, Time4VPS’s dashboard is very easy-to-use, so you’ll install your OS (operating system) with a few clicks and find everything you'll need basically at your fingertips.

Speed and experience

While talking about their network infrastructure, Time4VPS claims that they deploy fast and reliable optical connections to all exchange spots in Europe in order to deliver “amazing speed and stable connectivity” for workloads of their clients. Keeping their promises in mind, we decided to test the speed performance of their main website by making use of GTmetrix, our speed testing tool of choice. 

In a flash, we were stunned with one of the best performance scores we have laid our eyes on in a while. Sharing our impression, GTmetrix rated the website's performance with an A (99%), almost an impeccable performance. The site was fully loaded in 2.5 seconds and it took 57 requests at the same time, which is less than a half on an average result. 

Since Time4VPS promises an uptime of 99.98%, that is pretty much what we expected to see after monitoring the uptime of their main website for a month by using UptimeRobot. However, we were caught off guard with a report showing 100% uptime without a single second of downtime on the record, which was a rather pleasant surprise. 

Support

Apart from performance, customer support seems to be another of Time4VPS’s strong points. The first help option you’ll encounter upon entering their website is a rather extensive FAQ section featuring more than twenty questions with short and precise answers. Seeking deeper insight into how things work will take you to their knowledgebase and a community forum. Their knowledgebase has a familiar layout and contains more than a hundred articles on various topics. The articles themselves are for the most part short, but they manage to sum up the problem in an easy-to-follow way.

Time4VPS’s community forum appears to be active and (as far as we can observe) all of the questions are answered in a helpful manner by their employees. You can also get in touch with Time4VPS’s team via e-mail, ticket and live chat, all of which ought to be available round-the-clock. We decided to try our luck with a support ticket system and expected a reply within a few hours, but happened to get it in less than ten minutes, which is pretty praiseworthy.

The competition

Both Kamatera and Time4VPS are veterans of VPS hosting in their own right and are able to offer something to fit most needs. However, while Time4VPS is more focused on Europe, Kamatera’s ambitions are to cover the whole world, which becomes evident while looking at their global network of data centers deployed across four continents.

InMotion Hosting is a US-based web hosting provider popular for its powerful VPS packages. Both hosts are quite capable in terms of providing presentable performance, being smart on security and supplying you with all the right tools. However, in addition to VPS, InMotion offers basic shared hosting, WordPress-optimized hosting, dedicated server and private cloud hosting on top of everything, so there is more to choose from.

While Time4VPS is Lithuania-based, Bluehost is a web host from the USA and all of its data centers are found there. VPS solutions of both providers are fairly priced, although Time4VPS’s definitely are more on the cheaper side. However, if you are searching for something simpler to host a blog, basic website or just a little webstore, Bluehost has more suitable options on the menu.

Like Time4VPS’s previous competitor, HostGator is a US-based host with a whole array of hosting options, features and available apps. While Time4VPS is awfully affordable for a VPS-focused provider, HostGator shall supply you with more beginner-friendly features in general, such as free domain name, free SSL, one-click installs and 45-day money-back guarantee. When it comes to VPS in particular, although all of HostGator's plans include unlimited bandwidth, we would rather go with Time4VPS.  

Final verdict

If budget-friendly VPS hosting solutions from Europe are what you want, don’t fail to check what Time4VPS has to offer. Since everything comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee, you have nothing to lose. If you are, however, looking for a more versatile web hosting provider in terms of hosting types and options (or you want to fire up your first website and want an all-in-one package) take a good look at HostGator, Hostinger and Bluehost before agreeing to anything.

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