Web Hosting
Shared Hosting vs VPS vs Cloud: Which Do You Actually Need?
By Adam Eastwood · · 8 min read
Quick answer
Shared hosting suits most small sites — blogs, brochure sites, low-traffic shops — at the lowest cost. A VPS gives you guaranteed resources and root access when you outgrow shared or need custom software. Cloud hosting adds scaling and redundancy for traffic spikes and apps that cannot afford downtime. Most sites need less than they think.
Hosting tiers are usually explained by the people selling the upgrade, which is why so many one-page business sites end up on cloud infrastructure they never needed, and why some genuinely busy shops limp along on overloaded shared plans. This guide lays out what each tier actually is, what it honestly costs you in money and admin time, and the signals that tell you it's time to move up — or that you don't need to.
A note on scope: we're talking about where a website or web app lives. If you're weighing this up right now, our web hosting plans cover the shared tier of this spectrum, and the same trade-offs below apply whoever you host with.
What is shared hosting, really?
Shared hosting is one server (or cluster) running many customers' websites side by side. You get a slice of its CPU, memory, and disk, a control panel, and a managed stack — the host keeps the operating system, web server, PHP, and MySQL patched and running. You never touch a command line unless you want to.
The economics are the point: because dozens or hundreds of sites share the hardware, plans are cheap — typically a few pounds a month in the UK market. The compromise is that neighbours exist. Good hosts enforce per-account resource limits so one runaway site can't flatten the rest; oversold hosts cram accounts in and everyone's pages slow down at peak times. This is why two £4/month plans can perform completely differently, and why “unlimited” shared plans deserve scepticism — the hardware is finite, so the limits live somewhere in the fair-use policy instead.
Shared is the right answer when your site is a blog, a portfolio, a brochure site, or a small WooCommerce shop; your traffic is steady and modest; and you'd rather never think about server administration. That describes the large majority of websites.
What does a VPS actually get you?
A VPS (virtual private server) is a virtual machine carved out of a physical server. Unlike a shared account, your slice is defined: dedicated vCPU cores, dedicated RAM, your own operating system, and root access. Neighbours still share the underlying hardware, but a properly provisioned VPS isolates you from their behaviour to a far greater degree than shared hosting can.
Root access is the real product. It means you can:
- Run anything — Node.js, Python, Go, a game server, background workers, cron-heavy jobs — not just PHP and MySQL.
- Tune the stack: your choice of web server, database version, caching layer (Redis, Varnish), and PHP configuration.
- Host multiple sites and services on one predictable bill.
The honest cost is administration. On an unmanaged VPS, security patching, firewall configuration, backups, and 3am-something-broke are your job. If you can't or don't want to do that work, a managed VPS (the host handles the OS layer) splits the difference at a higher price. Budget realistically: an unmanaged VPS that saves £10 a month over managed alternatives is no saving at all if it costs you two hours of sysadmin time a month — or an unpatched vulnerability.
A VPS is the right answer when shared limits are genuinely constraining you, you need software a shared stack can't run, or you want consistent performance you can reason about — and you have a plan (personal skills or a managed service) for looking after it.
What does “cloud hosting” actually mean?
“Cloud” is the most abused word in hosting, so let's pin it down. Architecturally, cloud hosting means your site or app runs on virtualised resources spread across a pool of physical machines, with two properties a single VPS doesn't have: elasticity (resources can scale up, and sometimes out across multiple instances, on demand or automatically) and redundancy (if a physical host fails, your workload restarts elsewhere, often without you noticing). Billing is often usage-based rather than a flat monthly fee.
Be aware that plenty of products marketed as “cloud hosting” are, in practice, a VPS with a nicer dashboard — which is fine, but you should know which one you're buying. The questions that cut through the marketing: What happens if the physical host fails? Can I scale without migrating? Am I billed for capacity or for usage?
Cloud is the right answer when your traffic is spiky or unpredictable (launches, campaigns, seasonal retail), downtime has a real cost, or your application is built to scale horizontally. For a steady-traffic site, elasticity is a feature you pay for and never use.
How do the three compare side by side?
| Shared | VPS | Cloud | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical UK cost | £2–£10/mo | £5–£40/mo (unmanaged); more managed | Usage-based or £10+/mo |
| Resources | Shared pool with limits | Dedicated allocation | Elastic, pooled |
| Performance consistency | Depends on neighbours and host discipline | High and predictable | High, scales with demand |
| Handles traffic spikes | Poorly | Up to its fixed ceiling | Well — that's the point |
| Root access | No | Yes | Yes (IaaS) or abstracted (platforms) |
| Admin skill needed | None | Moderate–high (unless managed) | Varies: none to high |
| Failure recovery | Host-dependent | Restore from backup | Automatic failover (when genuine) |
| Best for | Most small sites | Custom stacks, steady workloads | Spiky traffic, uptime-critical apps |
Where does managed WordPress hosting fit?
One tier deliberately missing from the table: managed application hosting — most commonly managed WordPress — which is less a rung on the ladder than a different axis. Underneath, it runs on shared, VPS, or cloud infrastructure like everything else; what you are buying is the operations layer: server-level caching tuned for the application, automatic updates, staging environments, and support staff who debug WordPress rather than just the server. It typically costs more than equivalent raw capacity and is worth it when your site earns money and your time doesn't stretch to being its sysadmin. The same logic applies to managed databases and managed game servers: you are paying someone to hold the pager.
Which do you actually need?
Work upwards from the cheapest tier that fits, not downwards from the most impressive one. The upgrade signals are concrete:
- Stay on shared until you see sustained resource warnings, slowdowns at your peak hours that caching doesn't fix, or a software requirement the platform can't meet. A well-cached WordPress site on decent shared hosting comfortably serves tens of thousands of visits a month.
- Move to a VPS when you hit those limits repeatedly, or the moment you need custom server software. Before you move, rule out the cheap fixes: page caching, image optimisation, and a CDN solve a large share of “we've outgrown shared” cases for a fraction of the effort.
- Choose cloud when spikes or uptime requirements are the problem — not general slowness. If your site is slow every day, cloud elasticity won't fix it; if your site falls over every Black Friday, it will.
One more honest note: moving tiers is not a one-way door, and it is not even the biggest hosting decision you'll make — picking a host whose renewal pricing you understand matters more to your three-year costs than the tier does. And if the move itself is what's putting you off, migrating a WordPress site without downtime is a solved problem.
The bottom line
Shared hosting for most sites, a VPS when you need control or consistency, cloud when you need elasticity or redundancy. Match the tier to a problem you actually have — measured in resource warnings, peak-hour slowdowns, or outage costs — rather than to ambition, and revisit the question once a year. The best hosting tier is the cheapest one you never have to think about.