Vultr Laravel Hosting, a Laravel Forge Vultr Alternative and Vultr Control Panel With Zero Downtime Deploys

Does Laravel Forge work with Vultr?

Yes. Laravel Forge lists Vultr as a supported server provider and creates Vultr servers from an API key, but it treats Vultr as an external server and needs Forge's IP addresses on the key's allow list. Forge's pricing page gives the $12 Hobby plan unlimited Laravel VPS servers (Forge's own hosting) and exactly one external server, so a second Vultr server moves you to Growth at $19 or Business at $39, both with unlimited servers. Forge also added Vultr's newer VX1 server types to its provisioning form.

For one Laravel app on one Vultr server, Forge Hobby at $12 plus a $12 server is hard to beat, and we would tell you to buy exactly that. The picture changes when the app needs two servers. Forge's own FAQ says its native zero downtime deployments work on one server only, so a load balanced site needs Envoyer as a second subscription at $10 to $50 a month. That pairing, and the missing audit log, is where a Laravel Forge alternative starts to make sense.

How much does it cost to host Laravel on Vultr?

The server starts at $12 a month for a 1 vCPU, 2 GB High Frequency instance, and a panel adds $10 to $299, so one small production app lands between $22 and $71 a month depending on the panel. Vultr bills hourly up to a monthly cap, the price is the same in every US region, and automatic backups add 20 percent to the server's price. A Vultr Load Balancer is $10 a month.

These are the plans most Laravel teams pick, from Vultr's public plan list:

Four real setups, with the panel fee added. Every total below was added up by hand:

DeployManage is the most expensive line in every row, and the page should say so. What the extra money buys is in the third and fourth rows: one release that lands on both app servers together with migrations run once, and 10 named seats with a log of who deployed what. If neither matters to you, take the cheaper panel. For a wider look at server costs, see how much a Laravel VPS costs.

Which Vultr plan is best for Laravel?

For most production Laravel apps, a 2 vCPU, 4 GB High Performance or High Frequency server at $24 a month is the right starting point; the $10 to $12 plans with 2 GB suit staging or a small app without Horizon. Laravel itself is light. What uses memory is everything around it: PHP-FPM workers, MySQL or Postgres, Redis and a few queue workers on the same box. With 2 GB you are choosing between a sensible FPM pool and a database with enough buffer, and a traffic spike pushes the server into swap.

High Frequency and High Performance plans cost the same at 2 vCPU and 4 GB, $24. High Performance comes with more transfer (5 TB against 3 TB) and a choice of AMD or Intel; High Frequency gives a larger disk (128 GB against 100 GB). Regular Performance at $20 is cheaper and uses older SSD storage, which is fine for staging and background processing. Once the database outgrows the app server, move it to its own 4 GB server or to a managed database and keep app servers stateless, so adding a second one is a click rather than a migration.

Is Vultr good for Laravel hosting?

Yes. Vultr gives full root access, NVMe storage on its High Frequency and High Performance plans, hourly billing and nine US regions at one price, which is everything a Laravel app needs. Vultr also offers a one click Laravel image in its marketplace. It is a quick way to try Laravel, but it installs a LAMP stack with Apache on a single server and leaves releases, workers and rollbacks to you, so production teams usually provision a clean server with Nginx and PHP-FPM instead.

Where Vultr is weaker than the hyperscalers is the managed layer around the server: there is no equivalent of AWS's IAM policies or a large menu of managed services, which is exactly why teams put a panel on top. Against DigitalOcean the price for a 2 GB server is the same, $12, and the choice usually comes down to regions and which account the team already has. If you are comparing, our Laravel on DigitalOcean page runs the same numbers, and so does our Laravel Linode hosting page for Akamai's cloud, where the 2 GB plan is also $12.

How do I deploy Laravel to Vultr with zero downtime?

Build each release in its own directory, link the shared .env and storage folder into it, run composer install and migrations there, then switch a current symlink to it in one atomic step and reload PHP-FPM. Nginx's document root points at current/public, so visitors move from the old release to the new one between two requests. Rolling back is pointing the symlink at the previous directory.

On one Vultr server you can script this or use Forge's native option. On two or more servers behind a Vultr Load Balancer the order matters: every server has to have the new release built before any of them switches, otherwise some users get new code and some get old. Migrations must run once, not once per server, and queue workers on every server have to restart after the switch. That coordination is what DeployManage Growth does on each push. The queue worker Supervisor setup guide covers the worker restart step if you are building it yourself.

Can I move a Laravel app from DigitalOcean or AWS to Vultr?

Yes, and without downtime if you run both copies side by side for a day and switch DNS at the end. Build the Vultr server, deploy the same commit, copy the database and user uploads, and lower the DNS TTL to a few minutes a day ahead. On cutover day put the old app in maintenance or read only mode, run a final database sync, then switch the record. Keep the old server for a week before you delete it.

Uploads are the step people forget. If the app stores files on local disk, copy the storage/app folder along with the database, or better, move uploads to an S3 compatible bucket first so both copies read the same files. If you are coming from Elastic Beanstalk or EC2, our page on Laravel on AWS covers what to take with you.