What web hosting is, and how to choose between shared, VPS and dedicated

Hosting is the physical place your website lives. The files, the images, the database of orders — all of it sits on a computer that runs around the clock in a data centre somewhere, and hands it over to anyone who types your address into a browser.

That is all it is. The rest of the discussion is about how much of that computer is yours, and who looks after it.

The analogy that settles it

Think about somewhere to live:

• Shared hosting — a room in a flat with housemates. Cheap, furnished, but the kitchen is shared. If a neighbour cooks for fifty people, you wait.
• VPS — your own flat in a block. Your walls, your guaranteed resources, but the building, the lift and the roof are shared.
• Dedicated server — your own house. Nobody else uses your resources, but everything that breaks is yours to fix.
• Cloud — a house that changes size. It expands when guests arrive and shrinks when they leave.

How to choose, in three questions

1. How many people are on the site at once, not per month?

The figure that matters is not “visitors per month”, it is how many are on the site in the same minute. A brochure site with a few thousand visitors a month rarely has more than a handful at once — shared hosting is plenty. An online shop mid-campaign can have hundreds at once, and there the difference shows immediately.

2. What happens if the site is down for two hours?

If the answer is “nothing serious, we phone people”, you do not need expensive infrastructure. If the answer is “orders stop” or “nobody can work”, then you need guaranteed resources and somebody who picks up the phone at night.

3. Who administers it?

An unmanaged dedicated server is a responsibility, not an advantage. Security updates, certificates, backups, monitoring — somebody has to do them. If you have nobody, choose a managed service, even though on paper you get “less”.

What matters more than the hosting type

Three things are almost always more important than choosing between VPS and dedicated:

1. Backups. Automatic, in another location, tested by actually restoring them. Without that, the rest is decoration.
2. Where the data sits. If you hold customers' personal data, the server location matters for GDPR. A data centre inside the European Union simplifies the conversation considerably.
3. Who answers when it breaks. A provider with support in your language, at reasonable hours, is worth more than the technical specification.

Signs you have outgrown what you have

• The site loads noticeably slower at peak hours, but fast at night.
• You get messages about exceeded limits — memory, processes, space.
• The admin panel goes slow before the public site does.
• You added features — search, filters, reports — and the database has grown a lot.

None of these is an emergency on its own. Together, they are the sign that infrastructure has fallen behind the business.

The most common mistake

People pick a plan by storage space. It is the least important criterion: a brochure site rarely passes one gigabyte, and images can be optimised. Available memory and the number of simultaneous processes decide whether the site holds up under traffic — not disk space.

If you are not sure where you fit, write to us with what you have and what bothers you. We will tell you whether it is a hosting problem or just an optimisation one — it is often the second.

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