Where to host your website: shared hosting, VPS or cloud
The practical comparison between the three options, what to ask before signing, why the domain must be in your name and the five things that separate a decent provider from one that will cause you trouble.
· Cloud architecture
Hosting is one of those decisions that look technical and are commercial: it determines whether your site is up when a customer looks for it, whether you can get it back when something breaks and whether you can take it with you whenever you want. Here is what you need in order to choose without relying on faith.
The three options
Shared hosting
Your site lives on a server alongside many others. It is the cheapest option and the one demanding the least management: the provider takes care of everything.
Who it is for: corporate sites, blogs, small shops. For most small businesses it is the right option and nothing else is needed.
Its limit: you share resources. If another site on the same server spikes, your site feels it. And configuration room is limited.
VPS (virtual private server)
A reserved slice of a server, with guaranteed resources and full control over the configuration.
Who it is for: custom applications, shops with traffic, several sites together, anything needing specific software.
Its limit, and this is the important one: you administer it. Security updates, backups, certificates, firewall. A VPS with nobody maintaining it is a compromised server waiting its turn — and that is not a hypothesis, it is what happens.
Cloud (the large providers)
Infrastructure paid for by usage that scales on demand.
Who it is for: projects with heavy or very variable peaks, or with serious architectural needs.
Its limit: the bill is variable and hard to predict, and you pay for line items that are not obvious — egress traffic, requests, storage — until the invoice arrives. For a normal corporate site, the cloud is usually expensive and complex without giving anything back. Why the bill climbs and how to bring it down we cover in why your cloud bill goes up.
The practical rule
Start simple. Quality shared hosting for a corporate site; a VPS when you have an application of your own or shared hosting genuinely falls short; cloud when the problem is one of scale and somebody is measuring it.
Over-provisioning at the start is a certain cost against a hypothetical problem.
What to ask before signing
- What backups do you take, how often and how many days do you keep? And the real question: can I restore them myself, without asking permission or paying extra? Plenty of providers take backups and charge to give them back.
- How do I take my site with me if I leave? There must be a complete export — files and database — that you can reach yourself.
- Is a certificate included and does it renew on its own? An expired certificate leaves your site behind an insecurity warning.
- Where are the servers physically? It matters for speed and for personal data processing.
- What support is there and during what hours? With a written response time, not «24/7 support» on the home page.
The domain: the part that causes the most grief
And the easiest to fix. Three rules:
The domain is registered in your company's name, with your address as the administrative contact. If your old provider registered it in their name, the domain is theirs, not yours. It is the most common reason a business cannot change provider.
Registration and hosting can be separate, and often should be: if you fall out with the hosting provider, you do not want them controlling your domain too.
Turn on automatic renewal and check that the card on file is still valid. A domain lost through carelessness disappears within weeks, and getting it back can be impossible or extremely expensive.
Check today who is listed as the holder of yours. It is a public lookup and takes a minute.
Five signs of a provider that will cause trouble
- You cannot reach the control panel: everything goes through «ask our technician».
- There are no backups, or there are but you cannot restore them yourself.
- The domain is not in your name.
- Old software versions with no update plan.
- Aggressive first-year price and a renewal several times higher.
What almost nobody measures and should
Set up an uptime monitor — free ones exist — that checks your site every few minutes and emails you if it goes down. It is one of the cheapest and most useful things you can do, and it avoids the classic scenario: finding out you have been down for two days because a customer told you.
If this sounds like you
Choosing hosting, migrating without downtime and leaving backups, certificates and monitoring working is architecture and infrastructure; the site that sits on top is web and online shop. The other half of the matter — your data surviving a disaster — is in backups: the 3-2-1 rule.
And if you are already on the cloud and what does not add up is the bill, finding where the money goes is a separate piece of work: the cloud bill review.
We are Mindset & Code: automation, data and development for small businesses. You can see what we do and what it costs.
General guidance. Each provider's specific terms — backups, export, server location — are checked in their contract before signing, not on their pricing page.