Shared, VPS or cloud — which one do you need?

Shared hosting: cheapest, and someone else runs it

Many sites share one server and its resources. The host handles updates, security patches and backups. You get a panel, not a server.

Best for: brochure sites, blogs, portfolios, small stores, and anything under roughly 50k monthly visits.
What breaks first: concurrent uncached requests. A sudden traffic spike or a heavy checkout queues behind limited PHP workers.
Price: from $2.99/month.

Cloud hosting: dedicated resources, still managed

The middle option and the most underrated. You get reserved CPU and RAM and a dedicated IP, but the provider still administers the server. No root, no responsibility.

Best for: growing stores, news sites, anything where slow checkout costs money but nobody on the team wants to run Linux.
What breaks first: your application. At this tier, bad queries and unoptimised plugins are the bottleneck, not the hardware.
Price: from $7.99/month.

VPS: full control, full responsibility

Root access on a KVM slice. Install anything, configure anything, break anything.

Best for: custom stacks, apps that are not PHP, staging fleets, developers and agencies.
What breaks first: the parts you forgot to maintain — unpatched packages, an expired certificate, a backup nobody tested.
Price: from $6.49/month.

The signals that you have outgrown shared hosting

Move up when you see two or more of these — not before:

• The admin dashboard is slow while the public pages are fine (a PHP-worker symptom).
• Checkout or search times out at peak hours.
• You are hitting the inode or process limits in the panel.
• Backups take so long they overlap the next run.
• Support tells you your account is throttled for using too much CPU.

If none of these are happening, upgrading buys you nothing. Optimise the site first — it is free and usually more effective.

Questions people actually ask