For a brochure site or a small blog, shared hosting at around eleven dollars a month is the right answer and the upgrade conversation is a distraction. For a shop taking orders, buy managed WordPress or a properly sized virtual server and stop thinking about it. The jargon in this market exists to make a simple question complicated: how much isolation do you need, and who is doing the maintenance?
The five things you are choosing between
Underneath the marketing there are five patterns. Shared hosting puts hundreds of sites on one server with soft limits between them. Cloud hosting on a shared platform does the same thing with more generous and more elastic limits. A virtual private server gives you a guaranteed slice of a machine and root access, along with responsibility for the operating system. Managed WordPress gives you a tuned platform with somebody else doing the updates. A dedicated server gives you the whole machine.
The ordering is not a quality ladder, which is the part people get wrong. A well-run shared plan will outperform a badly configured virtual server every time, because the shared host has already done the tuning and you probably will not. The question is not ‘what is best’ but ‘what do I actually need isolated, and who is doing the work?’
Two things cut across all five tiers and matter more than the tier itself. First, caching: a cached site on cheap hosting beats an uncached site on expensive hosting. Second, a content delivery network, which the 2024 Web Almanac found serving only 33% of mobile HTML requests across the web, and which many hosting plans now bundle. Both are covered in our piece on why website speed matters.
Shared hosting, and when it is genuinely fine
Shared hosting has a bad reputation it has partly outgrown. It is genuinely the correct choice for a site with a few thousand visitors a month, no checkout and no custom application. You get a control panel, automatic SSL, one-click WordPress, and a support desk that will not expect you to read a log file.
What you need to watch is the pricing structure, because it is designed to be read quickly. Hostinger’s Premium plan is a good worked example, and all these figures come from its own pricing page: $2.99 a month if you commit to 48 months, which is $143.52 paid up front, renewing afterwards at $10.99 a month. The Unlimited plan is $3.99 introductory and $16.99 on renewal; Cloud Startup is $7.99 and $25.99. Budget for the renewal number, because that is your real cost from year two or five onwards.
The specification that actually decides whether the plan works is further down the page. Premium gives you 2 GB of memory, one CPU core, 40 PHP workers, 10 databases and 400,000 files and directories. Unlimited doubles the cores and lifts workers to 60. PHP workers are the number that bites: each one handles a single uncached request at a time, so a forty-worker plan running an uncached WooCommerce store will queue visitors during a promotion while showing you plenty of free disk space.
- You run a checkout, because carts and accounts cannot be cached and every one of them consumes a PHP worker.
- You need a specific PHP extension, a background worker, or anything that wants a command line.
- Your traffic is spiky in a way that matters commercially, like a campaign or a seasonal launch.
- You have more than one person deploying changes and you need a staging environment that is not a copy in a subfolder.
Cloud and VPS: paying for isolation
A virtual private server is a guaranteed slice: your own memory, your own CPU allocation, root access, and nobody else’s traffic affecting yours. The trade is that the operating system becomes your problem, including security updates, the web server configuration, PHP, the database and the backups.
DigitalOcean’s published Droplet prices give the shape of the market. Basic plans run from $4 a month for 512 MiB of memory and 10 GiB of disk, through $6 for 1 GiB and 25 GiB, $12 for 2 GiB, $24 for 4 GiB with two vCPUs and 80 GiB, up to $48 for 8 GiB with four vCPUs. Managed backups cost 30% of the droplet price for daily or 20% for weekly, and manual snapshots are $0.06 per GB a month. Since 1 January 2026 droplets bill per second with a 60-second minimum.
Amazon Lightsail is the same idea with the awkward parts pre-bundled, and its own pricing page publishes a useful worked example: a WordPress site on a $5 Linux instance, with a $2.50 CDN distribution and a $1 object storage bucket, comes to $8.50 a month delivered globally. Add a load balancer and it is $18 more; add a managed database and the standard 1 GB tier is $15. That is the honest way to price a virtual server, because the server alone is never the whole bill.
The real cost of a VPS, though, is the hour a month somebody spends patching it, and the evening somebody spends when a kernel update breaks something. If nobody on your team wants that job, you are not saving money by choosing a cheaper tier. You are deferring an expense and adding risk.
Managed WordPress: paying for somebody else’s attention
Managed WordPress is a platform rather than a server. The host runs the caching, the firewall, the CDN and the updates, gives you staging environments, and takes the support call when something breaks. You give up some control: restricted plugins, no arbitrary server software, and limits expressed in visits or bandwidth rather than CPU.
Kinsta’s published plans show how that is priced. The entry Business tier is $35 a month billed monthly or $30 annually, covering one WordPress install with 20 GB of bandwidth, 10 GB of storage, 125 GB of CDN traffic and 14 days of backup retention. From there the steps are $50, $90, $170 and $290 a month, with annual rates of $42, $75, $142 and $242. Agency plans start at $340 a month and enterprise plans at $500. Every tier includes unlimited migrations, malware removal and a CDN with more than 260 points of presence.
WP Engine sits in the same bracket with a different emphasis. Its plans page distinguishes shared-resource tiers from isolated-resource tiers, and it is the isolated tier that carries a 99.99% uptime guarantee along with managed migration services. The top tier advertises SOC 2 Type II compliance and one-minute target response times, which is the kind of thing you buy when an outage costs more than the hosting does.
The only sensible way to justify the price differenceOn managed hosting you are not buying hardware. You are buying the hour a month you would otherwise spend reading a changelog.
Dedicated servers, and when to stop
A dedicated server is a whole physical machine. It still has a place: workloads that need guaranteed hardware for licensing or compliance reasons, very large databases, and anything where virtualisation overhead genuinely matters. For a business website in 2026, it almost never makes sense. A virtual server with twice the specification usually costs less and can be resized in minutes.
If somebody is recommending a dedicated server for a brochure site or a small shop, ask which specific constraint requires it. A good answer names a licence, a regulator or a measured bottleneck. A vague answer about performance usually means the site needs caching rather than iron.
What it costs, side by side
Here is the comparison with real published numbers rather than dollar signs. Each row is a configuration you could actually buy, priced from the provider’s own page in October 2026.
| Configuration | What you get | Monthly cost | Who patches the server | Staging |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hostinger Premium, shared | 3 sites, 20 GB SSD, 2 GB RAM, 1 core, 40 PHP workers | $10.99 on renewal | The host | No |
| Hostinger Cloud Startup | 100 GB NVMe, 4 GB RAM, 4 cores, 100 PHP workers, daily backups | $25.99 on renewal | The host | No |
| Amazon Lightsail WordPress | $5 instance, 40 GB SSD, plus CDN and object storage | $8.50 | You | Build it |
| DigitalOcean droplet, 4 GB | 4 GiB RAM, 2 vCPUs, 80 GiB SSD, 4 TB transfer, daily backups | $31.20 | You | Build it |
| Kinsta Business, single site | 1 install, 20 GB bandwidth, 10 GB storage, 125 GB CDN, 14-day backups | $35 monthly, $30 annual | The host | Yes |
| Kinsta Business, next tier up | More bandwidth and storage, same managed platform | $50 monthly, $42 annual | The host | Yes |
The spread between the cheapest and the most expensive row is about four to one, which is far less than the marketing implies, and the gap buys three specific things: isolation, staging, and somebody else doing the maintenance. If you do not value all three, buy the cheaper row with a clear conscience.
The specs that actually predict trouble
Storage is the number on the front of the box and it is almost never what fails. These four are the ones worth comparing, and they are usually three clicks into the specification table.
- PHP workers or concurrent processes. Each handles one uncached request at a time. Hostinger publishes 40 on Premium and 100 on Cloud Startup. This is the number that decides what happens during a campaign.
- Memory. 2 GB is enough for a cached brochure site, 4 GB is a sensible floor for a shop with a few plugins, and anything with a page builder and a large catalogue wants more.
- Inodes, the file and directory count. Hostinger’s Premium plan allows 400,000. A media library with thousands of images and several thumbnail sizes each can approach that faster than you expect.
- Backup frequency and retention. Weekly backups mean up to a week of lost work. Kinsta publishes 14-day retention on its Business plans; many shared plans do not publish a retention period at all, which is itself informative.
Then measure before you move. Time to First Byte tells you whether hosting is your bottleneck, and the 2025 Web Almanac gives you a yardstick: 44% of mobile sites and 55% of desktop sites were in the good band, under 0.8 seconds, with 17% of mobile sites in the poor band above 1.8 seconds. If your TTFB is comfortably under 0.8 seconds, a migration will not make your site feel faster and you should spend the money elsewhere.
Choosing in ten minutes
Answer four questions and the choice makes itself. Do you take payments or hold customer accounts? If yes, skip entry-level shared hosting. Is there somebody who will happily apply operating system patches? If no, skip the unmanaged virtual server. Does an hour of downtime cost you real money? If yes, buy the tier with an uptime guarantee and support that answers quickly. And is your traffic spiky in a way that matters? If yes, choose something you can resize without a migration.
Most small businesses land in one of two places. A brochure site, a portfolio or a small blog: shared hosting around $11 to $26 a month, with caching and a CDN switched on. A shop, a booking system or anything with a login: managed WordPress from about $35 a month, or a 4 GB virtual server at about $31 if you have somebody to look after it.
Whatever you pick, check the renewal price, check whether migration is included, and check what the backup retention actually is. Those three questions have saved our clients more money than any amount of benchmark comparison. And if you are changing hosts as part of a rebuild, our note on redesigning without losing rankings covers the order to do things in so your search visibility survives it.
Eudora Technology plans and runs hosting migrations remotely for clients in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and the Americas, including the dull parts: matching PHP versions, moving email, and keeping the old host alive until the DNS has settled. Our web development and hosting page sets out how we work, and the mobile-first design guide covers what to test once the site is on its new home.
Frequently asked questions
Is shared hosting bad for SEO?
Not inherently. What hurts is a slow server, and some cheap shared plans are slow under load. Measure your Time to First Byte: under 0.8 seconds is in the good band and nobody will out-rank you for being on a shared plan. Being on the same IP address as disreputable sites is largely a myth for ordinary business websites.
Do I need managed WordPress hosting if I only have one site?
You need it if you want somebody else to run updates, staging and backups, and if an outage costs you money. At around $35 a month for a single site, the question is whether an hour of your time a month plus the risk is worth about $25 more than a shared plan. For a shop, usually yes. For a brochure site, usually no.
What happens when I outgrow a plan?
On shared and managed hosting you move up a tier, usually without downtime, because the platform is the same underneath. On a virtual server you resize the instance, which typically needs a reboot of a few minutes. The signs to watch are rising response times under load, PHP worker queueing, and support telling you that you have hit a resource limit.
Is a cheap VPS better value than shared hosting?
On paper a $12 droplet looks like more machine than a $10.99 shared plan, and it is. In practice you are also taking on the operating system, the web server, PHP, the database and the backups. If nobody on your team wants that work, the shared plan is better value, because a neglected server becomes a security problem rather than a bargain.
Should I host in the country where my customers are?
It helps, and a CDN helps more. Serving cached pages from the edge removes most of the distance penalty, and the 2024 Web Almanac found CDN-served requests far more likely to use modern protocols as well. Put the origin somewhere sensible and let the CDN handle geography, rather than choosing a worse host for the sake of a flag.
If you are not sure whether your hosting is holding the site back, we can measure it, tell you plainly whether a migration would help, and run it if it would. Get in touch with Eudora Technology to talk about your project.
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