You’ve decided that you want to host your own website, online store, or app but you’re not sure about how powerful your plan needs to be and what type of hosting you need. I’ve hosted all types of sites and apps over the years so I’m happy to breakdown the requirements and hosting types to help you decide.
Main things to consider
Type of website content
Websites with dynamic content require more resources per visit than static content, and websites that contain lots of media (e.g. images, animations, interactive elements) also use more resources than simpler text-based websites as they require more processing power to load and display properly. If a website consistently demands high performance, such as an eCommerce store with millions of products, it can exceed the resource allocation and trigger the host's limits even with a relatively low number of visitors.
Traffic patterns
Traffic spikes and high usage can lead to excessive resource consumption, triggering limits even if your overall visitor count is within the stated range. Traffic pattern is the biggest factor on what type of hosting and what plan to use. You can have a really demanding site but if it’s only getting one visit at a time it won’t need as many resources as a simple site that’s getting loads of visitors.
CMS/ website set up
If you’re using WordPress then it will be easy to find a host that is suitable for your site, hosting the type of content, and be able withstand the traffic that your site gets. If you need something more unique then you won’t be able to do that with shared hosting. You’ll likely need to use a VPS.
Also, consider how you want to build your website. If you want to take the easier route, you can use a website builder that comes with a web hosting plan, such as Hostinger or GoDaddy website builders. They’re typically easier to use than WordPress. The downside is that there would be limitations if you ever wanted to migrate your website to another provider, because the site you made with their website builder might not be compatible with other hosts.
If you want to be able to transfer your site between hosts easily, then building your site on WordPress is a better choice for you. Yes, getting used to WordPress’ nooks and crannies might take a while, but you can use it on any type of hosting on any provider, because all hosts supported WordPress as it’s open-source. Another plus point is that WordPress has a huge, active community, so if you encounter any issues there will be a lot of resources available, and many people would likely have the same experience before.
Management
You don’t need to be technical to host your own website but it does help. At any level you can find unmanaged, managed, and fully managed hosting. So, if you have a simple WordPress site and want to take care of security and updates yourself then you can. If you have a custom site that was built for you but you want to find a new hosting provider that can take care of everything from migration to management you can do that too.
Types of hosting
Shared hosting
Shared hosting can be reliable for websites with low traffic and a relatively simple infrastructure. Examples of a simple website are if your site doesn’t require visitors to log in, or if the content is static. If your website is that simple, then it’s going to be fine for your website to be hosted on shared hosting.
There are many tiers of shared hosting. There are shared plans that support 20K visits a month all the way up to 400K so if you start off low and need more resources it’s not too much of a pain to ask your hosting provider to put you on a higher spec plan.
Keep in mind that even though your site has low traffic, it can still struggle with shared hosting if it has poor code optimisation, uses resource-heavy plugins, serves large media files, and experiences frequent traffic spikes.
Shared hosting is popular among beginners because of its affordability and ease of use. However, this cost-effective option comes with a price. To keep costs down, you’ll have to share your resources with your ‘neighbours’ hosted on the same server. This hosting type may have some limitations, such as slower speed.
VPS hosting
Customer server environments will need to be set up on a VPS. That cannot be done with shared hosting. If you’re using WordPress or any other popular website making and management tools, you don’t need to use a VPS. In some cases if you have high security requirements you will need a VPS because if you accept customer payments on your website, certain regions might require you to apply stricter data protection measures. For example, GDPR in the European Economic Area and CCPA in California, USA. If you handle a large amount of customer information and transactions like that, it would be hard to comply with data privacy laws on a shared hosting platform. For that, dedicated or VPS hosting might be a better option for increased security and control over your server environment.
There are ways around this. If you use a service like Stripe, payment details never go to your server so you can sell things securely on a shared server without breaking any rules; however, if you are directly taking payment information and storing sensitive customer data then you would probably need a more secure server environment like a VPS.
Cloud hosting
Cloud hosting provides scalability and redundancy because the resources for a website don’t come from a single server. This is great when the peak traffic of a website regularly goes high above the normal load. It’s also good for growing businesses that don’t know how much resources their site will need.
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