Shared Hosting, VPS, or Cloud: Choosing Where to Run Your Site
Key takeaway
Pick based on who will patch the server. Shared and managed platforms include operations in the price and suit most brochure sites and small applications; a VPS or cloud infrastructure gives control and hands you responsibility for security updates, backups, and availability.
Hosting decisions are usually made on monthly price, which is the least important variable. The real question is how much operational responsibility you are taking on, and whether anyone is assigned to it.
The options
- Shared hosting — cheapest, no administration, and your neighbours' traffic affects you. Fine for brochure sites and low-traffic content.
- Managed platform hosting — the provider handles the stack, updates, and scaling for a specific technology. Excellent value if your application fits their model.
- VPS — your own virtual machine and full control. You are now the system administrator, including for security patches.
- Cloud infrastructure — elastic capacity, managed databases and storage, and pay-per-use. Powerful, and the bill rewards attention.
Questions that decide it
- Who applies operating system and runtime security updates, and how quickly? If the answer is "nobody assigned", choose managed.
- What happens during a traffic spike — does it degrade, scale, or fall over?
- What's the backup arrangement, and has a restore ever been tested?
- Do you need specific software, versions, or configuration the managed option won't allow?
- What's the real cost including the time someone spends maintaining it?
Things people discover late
- An unpatched VPS is compromised remarkably quickly; automated scanning finds it within hours of exposure.
- Shared hosting performance problems are invisible to you and unfixable by you.
- Cloud bills grow through accumulation — forgotten instances, snapshots, and egress.
- Email sending from your web server is usually a deliverability mistake; use a dedicated sending service regardless of host.
- Backups stored on the same machine as the site are not backups.
A sensible default
For a marketing site, managed hosting with a CDN in front. For a business application, a managed platform or cloud services with managed databases, so you own the application and not the machine. Take on raw servers only when there's a specific requirement and a named person responsible for keeping them patched — and put that responsibility in someone's job description, not in a wiki page.