Hosting and data
VPS or shared hosting: when do you switch?
Short answer
Shared hosting is enough for an ordinary business site: you share a server with others and the host does the management. A VPS is your own virtual server with fixed processing power and full freedom, but also your own responsibility for updates and security. Switch if your site gets slow at busy times, if you need software the host does not allow, or if you run an online shop where an outage costs revenue straight away.
What do you get with shared hosting?
A place on a server that belongs a little to everyone. The host puts as many sites on it as the machine can handle, keeps the software up to date and gives you a panel where you create mailboxes and databases.
For a site with a few pages and a contact form, that is the right choice. It is cheap, you have nothing to look after and the host fixes outages.
The downside is in the word shared. If a neighbour gets a spike, you notice. And you can only do what the host allows: the PHP versions it offers, the settings it releases.
What do you get with a VPS?
A server of your own, virtual but shielded. A fixed number of processor cores and a fixed amount of memory that are yours, busy or not. You choose the operating system and install what you like.
You also buy the work. The operating system wants updates. So do the web server, the database and PHP. There has to be a firewall, a backup, and someone who notices the disk filling up before the site goes down.
How do they compare?
| Shared hosting | VPS, self-managed | VPS, managed | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Processing power | Shared | Fixed, yours | Fixed, yours |
| Freedom in software | Limited | Full | By agreement |
| Who does updates | Host | You | Host |
| Who notices an outage | Host | You | Host |
| Mailboxes included | Usually | No | No |
| Suits | Business site, blog | Developers, own administrator | Online shop, custom work, busy site |
What signs tell you that you are outgrowing it?
- The site is slow at set times. Every morning, or as soon as a newsletter goes out.
- You get notices about limits. Too many processes, too much memory, a database being throttled.
- You need something that is not allowed. A particular PHP module, a search engine, a background task that runs longer than a minute.
- The site has become an online shop. WooCommerce with a few hundred products can still work. Magento does not belong on shared hosting.
- An infected neighbour. On poorly shielded hosting, a hacked site in the same environment can reach yours. See website hacked, what now.
If the site is only slow, first measure where it comes from. A page that is too heavy becomes a page that is too heavy with more memory on a VPS. How to check that is covered in Core Web Vitals explained.
What does a VPS not solve?
A badly built site. Forty plugins and five-megabyte images stay slow.
An outage of the machine underneath. A VPS is one server. If the hardware fails, it is down until it has been started elsewhere or restored. For anything that cannot stand still, you agree mirroring to a second location.
The lack of an administrator. This is where most switches run aground. The first months go well. Then a certificate expires, or the disk fills with log files, and nobody knows how it was set up.
Which one do you choose, then?
Look at who will maintain it.
- No technical knowledge and an ordinary site: stay with web hosting.
- A developer or administrator in house who does this regularly: a bare VPS.
- An online shop or application that has to keep running, without your own administrator: a managed VPS.
With us all three sit on the same hardware. If you grow, you move within the same environment and not to another party.