Picking a plan is mostly about three questions: how much traffic you expect, how much of the server you want to manage yourself, and what happens to your business if the site is slow or down for an hour.
The four main types
| Type | What you get | Who manages the server | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shared hosting | An account on a server shared with other sites, with a control panel | The provider | Company sites, blogs, small stores |
| VPS | A virtual server with guaranteed CPU, RAM and full root access | You (or a managed service) | Growing sites, custom stacks, several sites |
| Cloud | Virtual servers you can resize and add quickly | You (or a managed service) | Apps with changing load, staging and production |
| Dedicated server | A whole physical machine for you alone | You (or a managed service) | Heavy databases, high traffic, compliance needs |
Start from your traffic and workload
- A brochure site or blog with a few thousand visits a month runs comfortably on shared hosting.
- An online store, a membership site or anything with logged-in users needs more CPU per request: a larger shared plan or a VPS.
- Custom software (Node.js, Python, Docker, an ERP such as Odoo) usually needs a VPS, because you choose the runtime and services.
- Large databases, constant heavy load or strict isolation rules point to a dedicated server.
Be honest about management
A VPS or dedicated server gives you full control, which also means full responsibility: updates, firewall, backups, monitoring. If nobody on your team does this, either stay on shared hosting or add a managed service to the server.
Questions to ask before you buy
- Where are the servers, and is that close to your visitors?
- What is backed up, how often, and how do you restore?
- Can you upgrade the plan later without moving the site?
- Is the storage SSD or NVMe, and how much RAM is guaranteed?
- How do you reach support, and in which language?
Start one size smaller than you think you need if the plan can be upgraded in place, and watch CPU and memory usage for the first month.