Join Liquid Web and HostingAdvice for an expert session on 2025 VPS hosting trends. Learn how SMBs use secure, scalable VPS solutions to boost speed, SEO, and outperform shared hosting. Featuring real-time hosting comparisons and a live Q&A.
In 2025, small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are facing mounting pressure to deliver faster websites, tighter security, and a more reliable customer experience, without breaking the bank. That’s where Virtual Private Servers (VPS) come in.
Join Liquid Web and HostingAdvice for an expert-led, on-demand webinar that explores how modern VPS hosting is transforming the way SMBs approach performance, scalability, and security.
Whether you’re currently on shared hosting, managing cloud costs, or planning a strategic upgrade, this session gives you a front-row seat to the latest VPS trends and best practices.
We covered:
- The current state of SMB hosting: What’s working (and what’s not) for growing businesses
- 2025 market outlook: Exclusive HostingAdvice insights from their VPS demand research
- Why VPS matters for SEO and site performance
- How VPS protects against modern threats: Built-in and add-on security layers explained
- Isolation and uptime: What makes VPS more dependable than shared hosting
- When to upgrade: Strategic timing tips for SMBs preparing for peak seasons
We wrapped with a live Q&A and actionable takeaways to help you audit your current setup, prepare for growth, and explore if VPS is the right fit for your business this year.
Exploring VPS hosting trends: A comprehensive recap
Over the past several years, the VPS hosting market has experienced remarkable growth, and that trajectory shows no sign of slowing.
According to industry insights shared in this webinar, demand for VPS has reached all-time highs, with consistent quarter-over-quarter growth for more than two years.
What’s more, the global VPS market is projected to double, reaching $19 billion by 2030, and accelerating at an impressive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.0 percent.
Once considered a niche middle-ground between entry-level shared hosting and high-cost dedicated servers, VPS has now become the go-to solution for small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) seeking a balance of affordability, performance, scalability, and security.
This webinar, hosted by Liquid Web in partnership with HostingAdvice, explored why VPS adoption is accelerating, what’s driving its popularity among growing businesses, and how SMBs can strategically time the move from shared or cloud hosting to VPS.
The session featured Chris LaNasa, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Liquid Web, and Ryan Frankel, CTO at HostingAdvice, who brought both data and hands-on experience to the discussion.
The market shift toward VPS hosting
VPS hosting has been gaining momentum for years, but the panelists noted that growth has accelerated significantly in the last three. VPS searches, click-throughs, and adoption rates have reached record highs, driven by a combination of falling prices, improved technology, and heightened business expectations for website performance.
Where shared hosting once served as the default starting point for most small businesses, the limitations of shared environments, especially during traffic spikes, are now more apparent than ever.
Customers expect websites to load instantly, and studies from Amazon and Google have confirmed that even fractions of a second in delay can cause measurable drops in conversions. VPS offers a tangible performance upgrade, with dedicated resources, better isolation from other tenants, and faster storage options like SSDs.
At the same time, VPS adoption is being fueled by its expanding capabilities. Modern VPS environments support advanced use cases like containerization, API integrations, data analytics, and custom security hardening, capabilities that used to require expensive dedicated servers or enterprise-level infrastructure.
Why VPS is the “sweet spot” for SMB hosting
One of the webinar’s key takeaways was the positioning of VPS as the ideal middle ground in the hosting spectrum:
- Shared hosting: Lowest cost, but limited resources and performance vulnerability to “noisy neighbors.”
- Cloud hosting from hyperscalers: Highly scalable, but often complex to manage and billed on unpredictable, usage-based pricing.
- Dedicated hosting: Maximum control and performance, but with higher costs and maintenance requirements.
- VPS hosting: A cost-effective balance, providing enterprise-grade performance and security without the premium cost or operational complexity.
Chris LaNasa described VPS as a tool that directly supports core business objectives, not just a technical infrastructure choice. For SMBs, upgrading to VPS means:
- Faster load times for improved customer satisfaction and SEO rankings.
- Predictable flat-rate billing that avoids the budget surprises common with cloud usage-based pricing.
- Greater flexibility and control through root access and customizable configurations.
- Better uptime and reliability, which improves both user experience and search engine indexability.
The speakers emphasized that for SMBs with growing online operations, the ROI of VPS can be significant. Even small performance gains can lead to measurable revenue growth, making the upgrade financially justifiable.
Signs it’s time to upgrade
The panelists outlined clear indicators that a business has outgrown shared hosting:
- Frequent slowdowns or crashes during peak traffic.
- A more complex website with numerous products, plugins, or large media files.
- Increasing downtime or inconsistent performance.
- Limitations on control that prevent implementing custom configurations or tools.
They noted that many SMBs encounter these issues during seasonal or event-driven traffic surges. For example:
- Retailers can see over 65 percent jump in traffic on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
- Tax and accounting firms face intense seasonal demand during tax season.
- Travel businesses experience spikes in bookings during summer and holiday periods.
In these cases, waiting until traffic peaks to upgrade can be risky. Instead, the speakers recommended planning migrations 60+ days in advance of anticipated busy seasons, allowing time for staging, testing, and fine-tuning performance.
Migration best practices
A thoughtful migration strategy can make the move to VPS smooth and low-risk. Key recommendations included:
- Plan early – Set clear goals and timelines, and leave room for unforeseen challenges.
- Use a staging environment – Test the migrated site without impacting your live environment.
- Thoroughly test across platforms – Check performance on multiple devices and browsers, and verify all interactive elements.
- Monitor post-launch – Track load times, watch for errors, and confirm improved performance.
The Liquid Web VPS advantage
While many quality VPS providers exist, the webinar showcased Liquid Web’s Cloud VPS as a solution built specifically for growing businesses. Features include:
- Guaranteed performance – Dedicated resources and a 100% network and power uptime SLA.
- Flexible management options – Choose between self-managed or fully managed service.
- Predictable pricing – Flat monthly rates with no hidden fees.
- Built-in security – DDoS protection, advanced isolation, and optional add-on security tools.
- Seamless scalability – One-click upgrade to Cloud Metal single-tenant servers or bare metal if needs grow further.
Ryan Frankel highlighted that the decreasing cost of managed VPS means even SMBs without in-house IT teams can afford professional infrastructure management, freeing them to focus on business growth rather than server maintenance.
Projected growth & the road ahead
Both speakers agreed: VPS hosting is no longer a “nice to have,” it’s quickly becoming the default choice for ambitious SMBs. As more businesses demand high performance, uptime guarantees, and flexibility without the expense of dedicated hosting, VPS will continue to dominate the mid-tier hosting market.
The market’s rapid expansion is also tied to the rise of data-driven operations at the SMB level. VPS environments enable capabilities like real-time analytics, AI integrations, and custom application hosting, once limited to enterprises, that can now be implemented affordably.
The key message from the webinar was clear: SMBs that upgrade to VPS sooner position themselves for stronger performance, better SEO, and higher customer satisfaction.
With predictable costs, advanced capabilities, and scalability to grow alongside your business, VPS is a strategic investment in both present-day stability and future growth.
Watch the full on-demand webinar to hear all the insights, data points, and real-world examples from Chris LaNasa and Ryan Frankel, and learn exactly how to make the move to VPS hosting a success for your business.
Read the transcript
Please note that AI was used to remove filler words for clarity.
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