Shared hosting puts your site on a server alongside many others and is the right choice for most small business websites. A VPS gives you a portion of a server that is yours alone, with guaranteed resources and the responsibility of keeping it secure. Managed hosting is either of those with someone else doing the upkeep. The question is not which is best, but how much traffic and complexity your site has, and who is going to look after the server.
Shared hosting
Your site shares one server, and its processor and memory, with other customers' sites. The host looks after the server; you manage your site through a control panel.
For a brochure site, a small shop or a blog with modest traffic, this is enough, and it is the cheapest option by a distance.
The downside is neighbours. If another site on the same server gets busy or gets hacked, yours can slow down, and on the cheapest plans the host may squeeze a great many sites onto each machine.
VPS hosting
A virtual private server gives you a fixed slice of a machine: your own memory, your own share of the processor, your own operating system. Other customers cannot eat into it.
It suits sites with steady traffic, online shops that slow down at busy times, and custom applications that need software shared hosting does not allow.
The catch is that an unmanaged VPS is your server to run. Security updates, firewall rules, backups and monitoring are your job. If nobody on your team does that confidently, an unmanaged VPS is a risk rather than an upgrade.
Managed hosting
Managed means the host looks after the server for you: updates, security, backups, monitoring, and usually help when the site itself misbehaves. Underneath, it can be shared hosting or a VPS.
You are paying for people rather than hardware. For a business with nobody technical in house, that is usually money well spent.
What business class usually means
Hosts use labels like business, pro and premium freely, and they mean different things at different companies. Ignore the label and ask for specifics.
How many sites share the server? How much memory and processor is guaranteed rather than available only in bursts? How often are backups taken and how long is a restore? Who answers the phone, and when?
Signs you have outgrown shared hosting
The site slows down at predictable busy times and recovers afterwards.
The host has emailed you about resource limits.
You need software or settings the shared plan does not allow.
If none of those are true, moving up costs more without making any difference a visitor would notice.
Questions people ask
- Is shared hosting safe for a business website?
- It can be, with a reputable host that keeps accounts separated from each other and the server patched. Most of the risk on shared hosting comes from the site itself: outdated plugins, weak passwords and missing backups.
- Do I need a VPS for an online store?
- Not always. A small shop runs well on good shared hosting. Consider a VPS when the store slows down during busy periods, or when you add features that need more memory than the shared plan allows.
- What is the difference between a managed and an unmanaged VPS?
- With unmanaged, you get the server and you do everything else: updates, security, backups. With managed, the host does that for you. The server is the same; what differs is who is responsible when something goes wrong.
We do this
If you would rather have it done than do it, this is the part of what we offer that covers it.