Types of hosting compared: shared, VPS, cloud, managed, static

Hosting comparison articles usually exist to sell you the tier above the one you are on. This one tries not to. For a large share of small businesses the correct answer is the cheap option, and we will say so where it applies.

The useful way to think about it is a spectrum from sharing a building to owning one — and, more recently, to not needing a building at all.

1. Shared hosting

What it is: your site sits on one machine alongside dozens or hundreds of others, all sharing the same processor, memory and disk.

Cost: £3–£12 a month, honestly.

Good for: brochure sites, small WordPress sites, anything doing modest traffic where a slow afternoon is an annoyance rather than lost revenue.

The genuine drawbacks: you share resources, so a neighbour's traffic spike can slow you down. You get limited control. And support quality at the bottom of the market varies enormously.

The honest bit: shared hosting has a worse reputation than it deserves in 2026. Quality at the bottom of the market has improved substantially — NVMe storage, current PHP, sensible caching are now normal rather than premium. A well-built WordPress site on good shared hosting will outperform a badly built one on a VPS every time. Most small businesses on shared hosting do not need to move.

2. VPS (virtual private server)

What it is: a slice of a physical machine that behaves like its own server, with resources reserved for you rather than shared.

Cost: £5–£40 a month unmanaged; more with management.

Good for: sites that have outgrown shared hosting, applications needing specific software, anyone who genuinely needs root access.

The drawback nobody mentions in the sales copy: unless you pay for management, you are the system administrator. Security patches, firewall, backups, monitoring, and the 2am recovery are yours. An unpatched VPS is considerably more dangerous than shared hosting, because on shared hosting somebody else is at least applying updates.

The honest bit: only take a VPS if a named person will actually maintain it. “We'll sort it out” is not a maintenance plan. If nobody owns it, managed hosting is cheaper than the incident you are eventually going to have.

3. Dedicated servers

What it is: an entire physical machine, yours alone.

Cost: £80–£400+ a month.

Good for: heavy workloads, strict compliance or data-residency requirements, applications that genuinely need the whole machine.

The honest bit: almost no small business website needs this. If you are considering it for a website alone, you are probably solving a software problem with hardware. The exception is when regulation dictates where and how data sits — a real requirement we deal with in regulated sectors.

4. Cloud hosting

What it is: your site runs across pooled infrastructure rather than one machine, so capacity can scale up and down and a single hardware failure does not take you offline.

Cost: usage-based, which is the whole point and the whole risk.

Good for: genuinely variable traffic, applications that need to scale quickly, anything where a single machine is a single point of failure you cannot accept.

The drawback: the bill is not fixed. Usage-based pricing is excellent when you understand your usage and unpleasant when a bot discovers you. Set billing alerts on day one, not after the first surprise.

The honest bit: “cloud” is now marketing on a lot of products that are just shared hosting or a VPS. Ask what it actually means in the plan you are looking at. If the answer is “it's on our cloud”, that is not an answer.

5. Managed WordPress hosting

What it is: hosting specialised for one platform, with updates, caching, security and backups handled for you.

Cost: £20–£80 a month for a small business site.

Good for: WordPress sites that earn real money, run by people who do not want to think about servers.

The honest bit: you are buying somebody else's attention, not faster hardware. Whether that is worth four to ten times shared hosting depends on what an outage costs you and whether anyone in-house would otherwise do the maintenance. There is a fuller answer in is managed WordPress hosting worth it.

6. Static and edge platforms

What it is: the newest category and the one most small businesses have not heard of. Your site is built into finished files ahead of time and served from locations worldwide, with dynamic bits handled by small functions that run on demand.

Cost: frequently free at small-business scale.

Good for: brochure sites, marketing sites, documentation, blogs — anything where the content does not change per visitor.

The drawback: it does not run WordPress or a traditional database-backed application. Forms, search and dynamic features come from separate services. It requires a site built for the model.

The honest bit: where it fits, it is close to unbeatable — faster, more secure and cheaper simultaneously, which almost never happens in this industry. There is no server to hack and nothing to patch. This site runs this way. We explain the shift in static, serverless and the edge.

So which do you need?

The advice that applies to everyone

Do not upgrade to fix a speed problem you have not diagnosed. Slow sites are far more often caused by unoptimised images, too many plugins and bloated pages than by insufficient hardware. Moving a slow site to a bigger server usually produces a slightly faster slow site, and a larger bill.

Measure first. Then move, if the measurement says to.

If you would like someone to look at what you are on and say plainly whether it is the problem, book a free call. We will happily tell you to stay where you are — it happens often. See also what hosting actually is and what a WordPress store costs to run.