Start With Your Actual Traffic, Not the Marketing Page
Hosting providers love to upsell, and it's easy to end up paying dedicated-server prices for a site that gets 500 visitors a month. Before comparing hosting types, get an honest read on your current or expected traffic, and how much downtime you can tolerate.
Shared Hosting
Your site sits on a server alongside hundreds of other websites, sharing CPU, memory, and disk I/O. It's the cheapest option and perfectly adequate for brochure websites, small business sites, and low-traffic blogs.
Good for: New websites, low-traffic blogs, small business brochure sites.
Watch out for: "Noisy neighbour" slowdowns when another site on the same server spikes in traffic; limited ability to install custom software.
VPS (Virtual Private Server)
A VPS gives you a guaranteed slice of a physical server's resources — your own virtual machine with dedicated CPU and RAM allocations, even though you're technically sharing the underlying hardware. You get root access and full control over the software stack.
Good for: Growing websites, small to mid-size web applications, sites that need custom server configuration.
Watch out for: You (or your host) are responsible for server management, security patching, and monitoring unless you pay for managed VPS.
Dedicated Hosting
An entire physical server, exclusively yours. Maximum performance and control, at the highest fixed cost.
Good for: High-traffic sites, applications with strict compliance or data-residency requirements, workloads with predictable, heavy, constant load.
Watch out for: You pay for the full server capacity whether you use it or not — poor fit for variable or seasonal traffic.
Cloud Hosting
Resources are provisioned on demand across a distributed infrastructure (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) and billed for what you actually use, scaling up or down automatically as traffic changes.
Good for: Sites and apps with variable or unpredictable traffic, businesses planning to scale, teams that want to pay for actual usage rather than fixed capacity.
Watch out for: Costs can spike unexpectedly without budget alerts and auto-scaling limits configured correctly.
A Simple Decision Guide
- Under 10,000 monthly visitors, simple site: Shared hosting.
- 10,000–100,000 monthly visitors, or a web application: VPS.
- Consistently heavy, predictable traffic: Dedicated.
- Unpredictable traffic, planning to scale, or running multiple environments: Cloud.
Our Recommendation
Most growing businesses are best served by starting on managed VPS or entry-level cloud hosting rather than shared hosting from day one — the cost difference is modest, and it avoids a painful migration under pressure once your shared hosting plan starts throttling you during a traffic spike. See our hosting plans or cloud infrastructure services for current pricing, or talk to us about which fits your actual traffic.