VPS vs shared hosting: an honest comparison

First, the disclosure

We sell VPS and not shared hosting, so you'd expect this page to conclude "buy a VPS". It doesn't, quite: shared hosting is genuinely the right answer for a real class of sites, and pretending otherwise would cost us your trust for the price of one server a month. Here's the honest split.

Where shared hosting genuinely wins

• You never want to see a terminal. Shared hosting patches the OS, the web server and PHP for you. On a VPS, updates are your chore (ours adds engineers you can write to, but the root password is still yours).
• The site is small and calm — a brochure site, a hobby blog. A decent shared plan is cheaper than any VPS and the neighbours rarely matter at that scale.
• Email + site in one cheap bundle is often included, and at the low end that bundle is hard to beat on price alone.

Where a VPS wins

• Choose shared or dedicated vCPU to match your workload. A VPS gives you root access; application performance depends on resources and configuration.
• Run anything, not just PHP. Node, Python, containers, a real database, automation tools, a VPN. Shared hosting's answer to "can I install…" is usually no.
• A server IP can have a previous reputation. Check your intended use and configure DNS and mail authentication; inbox delivery is not guaranteed.
• Root access — the fix for the day your requirements outgrow a checkbox in cPanel.

The "VPS is hard" myth, updated

The traditional cost of a VPS was setup literacy: web server configs, firewalls, PHP versions. That tax has mostly collapsed — our one-click apps install WordPress, Nextcloud and friends at first boot, and pointing a domain is a panel operation. What's honestly still on you: updates and backups (automatic daily backups are a paid add-on you switch on per server; leave it off and snapshots are yours to take — we'd rather say that than let you assume every server is covered). If that sentence made you tired, that's a legitimate vote for shared hosting.

The 60-second checklist

Choose a VPS if any of these is true:

• a slow page costs you money (shop, SaaS, booking);
• you need software that isn't PHP-in-cPanel;
• you're already paying for two or three separate tools a small server could host;

Before moving traffic, test the new site and plan a final data sync. A rollback must preserve any writes received after the switch.

Comparing specific hosts rather than the category? We wrote an honest breakdown versus DigitalOcean, plus what makes cheap VPS hosting in Europe actually cheap.