What is shared hosting?
Shared hosting is one server running many customers’ sites, each inside an allocation the host enforces. Where the allocation is stated (2 cores, 2 GB RAM on Flashcloud’s Start and Hosting.com’s Starter, per their plan pages) you can compare plans; where it is a relative tier or a visit guidance you cannot. The host runs the operating system, the web server, PHP and the database; you get a panel and the limits.
The limits are the part to read. SiteGround publishes CPU seconds per hour and inode counts per plan; FastComet publishes a resource policy with a sustained-use rule. Those numbers are the honest description of what you are buying, and they are what the panel warns you about when the site grows.
What is a VPS?
A virtual private server is a virtual machine with its own operating system, CPU cores and memory reserved for you. Nobody else’s traffic spike slows your site, and you can install what you like. The trade-off is administration: on an unmanaged VPS, updates, security, backups and the web server are yours to run. A managed VPS has the host do that, at a higher price, and it is the product most of the hosts we review sell as the step above shared.
Eight of our ten hosts sell VPS plans. The other two (SiteGround, Hostinger’s cloud tier aside) sell cloud plans instead. Our list of hosts to grow into a VPS ranks the upgrade paths; we have not yet priced the VPS plans themselves.
What is cloud hosting?
A resource allocation sold by the unit, usually with redundancy under it, on infrastructure the host rents or runs at scale. In practice the plans look like a managed VPS with a different name and sometimes a broader choice of regions: Hostinger’s Cloud Startup and ScalaHosting’s Entry Cloud are the two cloud plans priced in our data, at $7.99 and $14.95 a month on long terms, renewing at $25.99 and $39.95. ScalaHosting’s cloud plans can be placed in partner and AWS regions beyond its own four locations.
The word “cloud” on a shared plan page usually means something smaller: Bluehost’s shared plans run on Oracle Cloud with a region chosen at checkout, which is still shared hosting.
When should you move up?
When the host’s published limits bite, not when a tier name tempts you. The signs:
- Repeated CPU or memory warnings in the panel during normal traffic, not during a crawl or an attack.
- A database near the plan’s cap (SiteGround caps databases at 1 GB; Hostinger at 3 GB).
- Inode counts near the limit, which usually means a plugin or a mail folder is spraying files.
- A store or membership site where cached pages are the minority of requests.
- A need to run something the shared plan does not offer: a different PHP setting, a service listening on a port, a cron job every minute.
If none of those is true, a bigger shared plan is the better buy. Moving from a 1 GB allocation to a 4 GB one on the same host is a plan change; moving to a VPS is a different way of working.
What does each step cost?
On the ten hosts we review, cheapest shared plans renew at $8.99 to $17.99 a month. The two priced cloud plans renew at $25.99 and $39.95. Managed VPS plans at these hosts, which we have not yet priced, generally sit in the same range or above. Expect two to four times the shared renewal for the first step up, and expect to pay extra for backups and a control panel licence on VPS plans where the shared plan included them.