Home › Guides › Choosing a host

Shared, VPS, managed WordPress or static: which hosting type do you need?

Most hosting advice starts from the product categories. It is more useful to start from the two questions that actually separate them: who runs the server, and what happens when traffic spikes.

Choosing a host · 12 min read · Last reviewed 2026-07-29

Hosting is usually explained as a product ladder: shared at the bottom, then VPS, then dedicated, with managed WordPress somewhere off to the side. That framing implies you climb it as you grow, which is misleading — plenty of large sites run happily on static hosting, and plenty of tiny sites belong on a VPS.

Two questions actually separate them.

Question one: who administers the server?

Someone has to apply security updates, configure the web server, renew certificates, manage PHP versions, and fix it at 2am when it breaks. Either that is the host, or it is you.

This is the single most consequential variable, and the one people most often answer optimistically about themselves. An unmanaged VPS at $5/month against shared hosting at $10/month is not a $5 saving — it is a $5 saving in exchange for becoming a part-time system administrator. If you enjoy that, it is excellent value. If you do not, you have bought yourself a recurring obligation to save the price of a coffee.

Be honest here. It matters more than price.

Question two: what happens when traffic spikes?

Your site gets shared somewhere popular and traffic goes up fifty-fold for six hours. What happens?

• Shared hosting: you hit a resource limit and the site slows or returns errors. In the worst case the host suspends the account to protect neighbouring sites.
• VPS: the server saturates and slows. It stays up if configured well. You can resize it, though usually not instantly.
• Managed WordPress: caching absorbs most of it. You may exceed a visit allowance and be charged overage or asked to upgrade.
• Static hosting: it is served from a CDN and absorbs the spike without noticing. You may exceed a bandwidth allowance.

Note the failure modes differ in kind, not just severity. Shared hosting fails by going down; static hosting fails by charging you. Which you prefer depends entirely on what the site is for.

The four categories

Shared hosting

What it is: your site on a physical server alongside anywhere from dozens to hundreds of others, sharing its CPU, memory and disk. The host administers everything; you get a control panel and FTP or file-manager access.

Why it is cheap: the cost of the machine is divided many ways. That is also its defining constraint — you are sharing finite resources with neighbours whose behaviour you cannot control. A badly-behaved site on the same box affects you.

Good for: brochure sites, small blogs, portfolios, anything with modest and predictable traffic where cost matters more than headroom.

Watch for: the renewal price, which is where shared hosting's real cost lives (see the renewal trap), and the resource limits that are not on the pricing page (see what "unlimited" means).

VPS and cloud

What it is: a virtual machine with guaranteed CPU, memory and disk, isolated from other customers. Root access. You choose the operating system and install what you like.

The distinction that matters is managed versus unmanaged. Unmanaged means you get a bare server and everything above the hypervisor is yours: patching, firewall, web server, database, backups, monitoring, TLS. That is where the low prices are. Managed VPS costs substantially more and moves much of that back to the host.

Good for: custom applications, anything needing specific software versions, developers who want control, and workloads that outgrow shared hosting.

Watch for: the real cost being your time. Also bandwidth overage on some providers, and the fact that "cloud" pricing can be usage-based in ways that surprise you — a fixed-price VPS is easier to budget than a metered cloud instance.

Managed WordPress

What it is: hosting tuned specifically for WordPress, with server-level caching, automatic core and plugin updates, staging environments, daily backups, WordPress-specific security rules, and support staff who know WordPress rather than generic hosting.

Why it costs more: you are buying labour, not hardware. The underlying infrastructure is often comparable to shared hosting; the difference is that the WordPress-specific maintenance is included.

Good for: WordPress sites that generate revenue, sites where downtime costs real money, and anyone who would otherwise pay someone to do maintenance.

Watch for: plugin restrictions (caching and backup plugins are usually banned because the host provides them), visit-based pricing with overage charges, and paying a premium for a hobby blog that does not need it. See when the premium is worth it.

Static and JAMstack

What it is: your site is built into plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, then served from a CDN. There is no server executing code per request, which is why it is fast and why the free tiers are generous. Dynamic behaviour comes from serverless functions and third-party APIs.

Good for: sites built with React, Vue, Astro, Hugo, Jekyll or similar; documentation; marketing sites; blogs from a static generator; anything where content changes at build time rather than per request.

It cannot run WordPress in the normal sense — WordPress needs PHP and MySQL executing per request. Headless WordPress with a static front end is possible and is a meaningfully more complex architecture.

Watch for: build minutes, bandwidth and function invocation limits on free tiers, which is where the bill appears if it appears at all. See where the limits bite.

Choosing

That last row is not a dodge. Hosting plans advertising "unlimited storage" are sold for websites, and using one as a backup drive breaches the terms of nearly every host — see what hosting is not for.

Changing your mind later

Moving between categories is not equally easy in both directions, which is worth knowing before you commit.

Shared to VPS, or shared to managed WordPress, is straightforward — usually a database and files, and the destination host will often do it for you free. Anything to static requires rebuilding the site, because it is an architectural change rather than a move. Static to anything is easy.

So the choice that is genuinely hard to reverse is picking a dynamic platform when a static one would have done. If your site is content that changes rarely, it is worth considering static early — the running cost is frequently zero and the migration cost later is not.

Further reading

• The renewal price trap — what shared hosting really costs.
• What "unlimited" means — the limits behind shared hosting.
• Is managed WordPress worth it?
• Is free static hosting really free?