Backups and Disaster Recovery: The 3-2-1 Rule Explained
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3 min read · Evergreen guideShared Hosting, VPS or Cloud: Choosing Where Your Website Lives
Hosting affects speed, uptime, security and cost. Here’s how the main options differ and how to choose the right one for your stage of growth.
Key takeaways
- Shared hosting is affordable and simple, but resources are shared with other sites.
- A VPS gives dedicated resources and more control, with more responsibility.
- Cloud infrastructure scales on demand and suits growing or variable traffic.
- Managed hosting adds expert care, covering updates, security and backups, to any of these.
Shared hosting
Many websites share one server and its resources. The provider manages the server, and you get a control panel to manage your site.
- Good for: brochure websites, small blogs, new businesses with modest traffic.
- Pros: low cost, easy to start, no server administration.
- Cons: performance can be affected by other sites on the server, resource limits are tight, and control is limited.
Virtual private server (VPS)
One physical server is divided into isolated virtual servers, each with guaranteed resources.
- Good for: busier business sites, online stores, web applications.
- Pros: dedicated resources, more consistent performance, full control of software.
- Cons: needs server administration skills for security, updates and configuration, unless it is managed for you.
Cloud infrastructure
Resources come from large pools of servers and can be increased or reduced as needed, often automatically.
- Good for: growing businesses, apps, stores with seasonal peaks, anything that needs high availability.
- Pros: scalability, redundancy across locations, a wide range of services (databases, storage, content delivery).
- Cons: pricing can be complex, and it needs careful architecture and cost monitoring.
Managed or unmanaged?
Unmanaged hosting gives you the server, and the rest is your job. Managed hosting adds a team that handles setup, security patches, monitoring, backups and performance tuning. For businesses without in-house technical staff, managed hosting usually costs less than the downtime and security problems it prevents.
What to compare
- Performance: server location near your customers, fast storage, caching and a content delivery network.
- Reliability: uptime commitments, redundancy, monitoring.
- Security: firewalls, malware scanning, automatic updates, isolation from other customers.
- Backups: frequency, retention, off-site storage and how easy it is to restore.
- Support: response times, expertise, and channels you can actually reach.
- Scalability: how easily you can upgrade when traffic grows.
- Total cost: introductory prices versus renewal prices, and the cost of add-ons.
Signs you have outgrown your hosting
- Pages slow down during busy periods.
- You see resource limit warnings or unexplained downtime.
- Your site has grown into a store or application with many logged-in users.
- You need features your current plan doesn’t allow.
Moving hosting can be done without downtime when planned well: copy the site, test it on the new server, then switch the domain.
Our Cloud Services range from managed hosting to multi-region cloud, and include migration from your current host.
Frequently asked questions
Does hosting location affect SEO?
Indirectly. Hosting close to your visitors, or using a content delivery network, improves speed, and speed affects user experience and search performance.
Is cloud hosting always more expensive?
Not necessarily. Small cloud setups can be economical, and you pay for what you use. Costs need monitoring, though, because they grow with usage.
