Shared, VPS or Dedicated: Which Hosting Type You Need

Hosting types make most sense through a housing analogy. Shared hosting is a flat in an apartment block: cheap, everything is already there, but the neighbour practising drums affects you. A VPS is a flat with its own meters and full-height walls. A dedicated server is a house. Cloud is a house you can extend while living in it.

Shared hosting

Many sites share one server and its resources. The provider maintains everything — operating system, PHP, security patches.

• Cost: €4.20–16 per month
• Suits: brochure sites, blogs, smaller stores, anything up to roughly 50,000 visits a month
• Upside: you need to know nothing about server administration
• Downside: resources are capped and shared; on poor providers one aggressive site slows the rest

Worth stressing: shared hosting quality varies enormously. NVMe storage instead of spinning disks, a sane number of accounts per server and proper caching make a difference of several hundred milliseconds in TTFB. That is exactly why our plans run on NVMe with a CDN in front.

VPS (virtual private server)

One server is partitioned into isolated slices with guaranteed resources. Your share of CPU and RAM cannot be taken by anyone else.

• Cost: €10–80 per month depending on specification
• Suits: stores with steady order volume, sites above 50,000 visits, applications needing a specific configuration
• Upside: root access, your own software versions, predictable performance
• Downside: you are now the sysadmin — updates, firewall, monitoring. Managed VPS solves that but adds €20–40.

Dedicated server

An entire physical machine is yours.

• Cost: €80–400 per month
• Suits: large publishers, applications under constant heavy load, strict data residency requirements
• Downside: scaling means ordering new hardware, and it is expensive even when underused

For the vast majority of businesses this is overkill. If you are unsure whether you need it, you do not.

Cloud hosting

Your site runs across a cluster and resources scale up or down on demand. You pay for consumption.

• Suits: sites with unpredictable spikes — media, campaigns, seasonal retail
• Downside: the bill can surprise you unpleasantly if traffic runs away, and configuration takes real knowledge

How to know you have outgrown shared hosting

Do not watch visitor counts; watch these signals:

• The WordPress admin is slow even though the front end is cached
• You receive notices about exceeding CPU or process limits
• The site falls over every time you send a newsletter or post on social media
• WooCommerce checkout occasionally takes more than 5 seconds at peak
• You need a software version your provider does not offer

If none of these apply, stay put. Upgrading to a VPS you do not need means paying four times more for unused resources while taking on administration work you never wanted.

Practical advice

Most businesses start on shared hosting and stay there for years, and that is entirely reasonable. Rather than reaching for a more expensive tier, first check whether your current plan runs on modern infrastructure: NVMe storage, PHP 8.2 or newer, built-in caching, a CDN. Good shared hosting will comfortably beat a badly configured VPS.

You can see exactly what our plans include and which site sizes they target on the SEO hosting page. If you are unsure what you need, ask us — we would rather tell you the smaller plan is enough than sell you something you will not use.