Shared hosting, VPS or your own server: what the difference costs you

Your hosting renewal arrives. The cheap plan you signed up for five years ago has crept up in price, an upsell email offers you a VPS for three times as much, and a web designer once told you to get your own server. You have no idea which of these matters, so you pay the renewal and get on with your day.

Paying the renewal is often the right call. Sometimes it is the most expensive thing you do all year, and you will never see the bill for it.

What you are buying at each tier

All three options put your website on a computer in a data centre. The difference is how many other people’s websites share that computer, and how firmly the host stops them getting in your way.

Shared hosting puts your site on one server with hundreds of others, sometimes more. Every site draws on the same processor, the same memory and the same disks. The host keeps costs low by packing in as many accounts as the machine will tolerate, which is why it costs a few pounds a month.

A VPS, a virtual private server, carves one physical machine into a handful of slices and gives you one. Your slice has a fixed amount of memory and processor time that nobody else can borrow. You still share the hardware underneath, but with a few neighbours rather than a few hundred, and with walls between you.

Your own server, often called dedicated hosting, gives the whole machine to one site or one business. Nobody else runs anything on it. When your page loads slowly, the cause is on that box and somebody can find it.

What “unlimited” means

Shared plans advertise unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage and unlimited websites. Read the acceptable use policy and the limits are there, written in terms most owners cannot check: CPU seconds per hour, concurrent processes, database queries, a cap on the number of files.

Bandwidth and storage were never the scarce part. A small business site uses very little of either. What runs out is processor time, and the plan rations that without putting a number on the sales page.

When your site hits the limit, the host slows it down or switches it off for a few minutes. You find out when a customer says the site was down, or when you notice an email from the host with “resource usage” in the subject line, filed under promotions six weeks ago.

Why the neighbours matter

On shared hosting your site’s speed depends on what the other sites on the server are doing, and you cannot see them.

One of them runs a sale and gets a burst of traffic. Another has been hacked and is sending spam. A third has a badly written plugin that hammers the database every time a page loads. Each of those takes processor time from the same pool your site draws on, and your pages wait in the queue behind them.

This explains a pattern owners describe to us often: the site is fine when they check it in the evening, and slow when customers visit in the middle of the working day. The middle of the day is when the neighbours are busiest too.

There is a security side as well. Hosts isolate accounts from each other, and most do it well. A server running hundreds of sites still has hundreds of sets of out-of-date plugins on it, and one bad flaw in the host’s own setup puts all of them in reach. If you have read what to do when a WordPress site is hacked, you will know the clean-up costs more than the hosting ever did.

The numbers from a real move

We moved one site off shared hosting onto its own server. Nothing else changed: same WordPress install, same theme, same images, same plugins.

• Before: 4.15 seconds to load on average, 13.67 seconds at worst, with files arriving at 57 KB a second.
• After: 0.52 seconds on average, 1.31 seconds at worst, at 415 KB a second.

The worst case is the figure to look at. A visitor who waits 13 seconds has gone back to Google long before the page appears, and on shared hosting that worst case is whatever the busiest neighbour makes it. A site with the machine to itself has a worst case close to its average, because nothing else is competing for it.

If you want to check where your own site stands first, why your website is slow shows you how to read the one number that points at the hosting, in about five minutes.

When shared hosting is fine

Plenty of sites belong on shared hosting, and paying more would be money wasted.

A brochure site that does not need to win work. A plumber with three years of bookings ahead, whose site exists so returning customers can find the phone number, does not need 0.5 seconds. Two seconds is fine.

A site with almost no visitors. If a few dozen people a week look at it, the odds of one arriving while the server is busy are low, and the cost of losing that one is small.

A site you are about to replace. Moving hosting a month before a rebuild is effort spent twice.

Shared hosting stops being fine when the website is how new customers find you. A solicitor’s practice that gets its enquiries from search, a shop taking orders, a trade business running Google Ads at a pound or two a click: for those, a slow page loses work that has already been paid for, and the hosting saving is a rounding error next to it.

Where a VPS fits

A VPS sits in the middle, and it is a good middle. You get guaranteed resources at a modest price.

The catch is that most VPS plans come unmanaged. You get a bare machine and a login. Somebody has to install the web server, keep the operating system patched, set up the firewall, watch the disk filling and arrange backups that live somewhere else. A shared host does all of that for you, badly perhaps, but it does it. A VPS with nobody looking after it is a fast server slowly going out of date, and that ends worse than a slow one.

So the real choice comes down to who runs the server. If you have somebody who will patch it every month and notice when it misbehaves, a VPS is good value. If you do not, pay for managed hosting, where somebody else carries that job.

What we do

We host client WordPress sites on our own servers, each site on a server of its own, and static sites on an edge network that serves pages from close to the visitor. None of it is shared hosting. Patching, monitoring and off-server backups come with it, and the move across is free.

That is our Care & Hosting plan, at £49 a month. If you would rather know whether your hosting is the problem before deciding anything, ask for a free website review. We will measure your site, tell you whether the server is what slows it down, and say so plainly if your current plan is fine.