Shared vs VPS vs cloud hosting

  • Shared: cheapest, you share the machine
  • VPS: reserved CPU and memory, fixed size
  • Cloud: reserved and resizable without a migration

What you actually share, and what breaks first

The three are usually explained with analogies about flats and houses, which tells you nothing about which to buy. The practical difference is what you share with other customers, what happens when somebody else gets busy, and how quickly you can add capacity.

Compare every plan and price

The actual difference between the three

Stated as what you share, because that is what every other difference follows from.

What you get in each

Shared hosting

Your site sits on a machine with many others and the CPU and memory are pooled. It is by far the cheapest, and it is genuinely enough for a brochure site, a small WordPress site or a new store. The trade is that a busy neighbour can affect you.

VPS hosting

A slice of a machine with CPU, memory and disk reserved for you alone. A neighbour cannot take your resources. You choose the size up front and changing it is a deliberate upgrade, usually with a short reboot.

Cloud hosting

Reserved resources like a VPS, but the capacity is drawn from a pool rather than one physical machine, so it can be resized without rebuilding and survives the loss of a host node. You pay for that flexibility.

Managed or unmanaged

A separate question from all three. Managed means we patch the operating system, monitor it and fix it at three in the morning. Unmanaged means root access and it is yours. Do not buy unmanaged unless somebody on your side is on call.

How to tell which one you need

Signs you have outgrown what you are on, in the order they usually appear.

Four signals worth acting on

The site is fine until it is not

Fast most of the day and slow at a particular hour is the classic shared-hosting symptom - either a neighbour or your own traffic peak. Reserved resources fix it; a faster theme does not.

You hit a resource limit

Shared plans cap CPU, memory and processes. If your control panel shows you hitting those limits, you have outgrown the plan rather than misconfigured it.

You need software we do not install

A specific PHP extension, a queue worker, a non-standard database, a background daemon. Shared hosting cannot give you those; a VPS or cloud server can.

Downtime now costs money

Once an hour offline is a real loss, the arithmetic changes. That is the point at which cloud hosting, which survives a host node failing, stops being an indulgence.

What each one costs

Roughly, and in that order - the gap between them is smaller than most people expect.

Three things about the price

Shared is a few hundred rupees a month

Low enough that cost is rarely the reason to leave it. Current prices are on the web hosting page.

VPS is a multiple, not an order of magnitude

Usually several times shared rather than ten times. If your site earns anything, the gap is small against an hour of downtime.

Managed costs more than unmanaged, and should

The difference is somebody else being responsible at three in the morning. Price the alternative - your own time, at the worst possible moment - before deciding it is expensive.

Shared, VPS and cloud: common questions

On shared web hosting your site sits on a machine with many other customers and the CPU and memory are pooled, so a busy neighbour can slow you down. On a VPS a fixed slice of CPU, memory and disk is reserved for you alone and nobody else can take it. Shared is cheaper and genuinely enough for most brochure sites; a VPS is what you move to when the site needs guaranteed resources or software shared hosting cannot install.

Not better, different. Both give you reserved resources. A VPS is a fixed size on one physical machine, so resizing is a deliberate upgrade. Cloud hosting draws from a pool, so it can be resized without rebuilding and keeps running if a host node fails. You pay for that flexibility, and if your size is stable and predictable a VPS is the cheaper answer.

For most business websites, yes. A brochure site, a small WordPress site or a new store runs comfortably on shared hosting, and the money saved is better spent on the site itself. The point to move is when traffic becomes genuinely spiky, when you hit the plan resource limits, or when downtime starts costing more than the upgrade.

Four signals, roughly in the order they appear: the site is fast most of the day and slow at one particular hour; your control panel shows you hitting CPU, memory or process limits; you need software the shared platform cannot install; or an hour of downtime now costs real money. One of those is a reason to look, two is a reason to move.

Yes, in either direction, and we handle the migration free of charge including mapping URLs so search rankings survive. Moving up is the common direction, but moving back down is perfectly reasonable if you over-bought - there is no benefit in paying for reserved capacity you never use.

Managed unless somebody on your side is genuinely on call. Managed means we patch the operating system, monitor it and act on an alert at three in the morning. Unmanaged gives you root access and full control, and it also makes every one of those things your responsibility. The price difference is smaller than one bad night.

Where to go next

Plans and prices for each of the three.

Compare every plan and price