Shared, VPS, dedicated, managed: how we actually pick a WordPress host.

The decision that keeps coming back

The most expensive line item on a WordPress project is rarely the hosting bill. It’s the migration off the host you picked to save money. We’ve done that migration more times than we can count, and the pattern barely changes. A business picks a $5 a month plan because the number is small. The site grows into something that actually earns. Then the cheap host starts showing up in the worst places: slow checkouts, white screens during a sale, a support ticket that sits open for three days while orders pile up.

Hosting is the single most common “I picked the cheap option and regretted it” decision in this whole stack. So here is how we actually think about it. Four tiers in plain terms, what each delivers, where it breaks, what it costs, and the decision tree we run on real client work.

Shared hosting: the default trap

Shared hosting is what you get when you type “cheap WordPress hosting” into a search bar. Your site lives on a single physical server alongside hundreds, sometimes thousands, of other sites. Everyone shares the same CPU, memory, and disk. The price is the entire pitch: $3 to $15 a month, usually with a first-year discount that doubles on renewal.

For that money you get a working WordPress install and very little else. It runs fine when nothing is happening. The problem is the neighbors. When the account three doors down gets a traffic spike or kicks off a runaway backup job, your site slows down with it. That’s the noisy-neighbor problem, and you have no control over it. We once watched a client’s store crawl during their own launch. Their traffic was fine. Someone else on the box was hammering the shared database.

Shared hosting breaks in predictable places: concurrent traffic, WooCommerce, anything that can’t be cached. A brochure page served from cache survives almost anything. A cart, a checkout, a logged-in session: those are dynamic requests that hit PHP and the database every time, and that is exactly what shared plans throttle hardest. Support is tier-one and script-driven. Staging, if it exists at all, is an afterthought. Server-level caching is usually absent, so you end up bolting on W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache to do work the host should already be doing.

Shared hosting is fine for one thing: a site that makes no money and can afford to be down. A personal blog. A coming-soon page. A throwaway box. The moment money moves through the site, shared becomes a false economy. You don’t save $20 a month. You pay for it later, in lost orders and an emergency 2 a.m. migration.

VPS: control, if you want the job

A VPS (virtual private server) carves a physical machine into isolated slices, each with guaranteed CPU and memory the neighbors can’t touch. You get root access. You can install what you want, tune the stack, run other services next to WordPress. The server itself runs roughly $20 to $100 a month, more as you add resources.

The catch hides in one word: unmanaged. A bare VPS from DigitalOcean or Linode hands you an empty Ubuntu box. You are now the sysadmin. Security patches, the Nginx config, PHP-FPM pool tuning, MySQL optimization, backups, SSL renewal, the firewall, the cache layer. All of it is your job now. Control panels like RunCloud or GridPane sit on top to make this less painful, and they’re genuinely good. They don’t remove the responsibility, though. They just organize it.

A VPS is right for a specific person: a developer or a team with real ops capability who wants control and will actually use it. It’s also right when you need something unusual, like a custom Node service running beside the site, a pinned PHP version, or a non-standard architecture a managed host won’t allow. For a business owner who just wants their store to work, a VPS is a part-time job they didn’t ask for. We’ve inherited plenty of these boxes: the original developer moved on, nobody ran an apt upgrade in two years, and the thing was one CVE away from getting popped.

Dedicated hosting: rare and specific

A dedicated server is a whole physical machine that’s yours alone. No virtualization, no sharing. Every cycle and every byte of RAM belongs to your site. This is the top of the raw-iron pile, and it’s priced that way: $100 to several hundred a month, sometimes well into four figures for serious hardware.

Here’s the honest version for 2026. Most sites that think they need dedicated don’t. The cases where it’s genuinely the right call are narrow. Enormous sustained traffic that a well-tuned managed platform can’t absorb. A compliance or data-residency rule that demands single-tenant hardware. A workload so specific you have to own the physical machine. We’ve specced dedicated maybe a handful of times in nine years, and every time the reason fit in one sentence.

If you can’t write that sentence, you don’t need dedicated. What most people actually want when they reach for it is reliability and performance, and there’s a better way to buy those now than renting a whole machine plus a sysadmin to babysit it.

Managed WordPress: what we default to

Managed WordPress is a platform built to do one job well: run WordPress. The host owns the infrastructure, the server config, the caching, the security hardening, the daily backups, the staging environments, and the updates to the underlying stack. You own your site and your content. You stop being a sysadmin and go back to running a business. We use Kinsta for this, and we’re a Kinsta Agency Partner, so we run a lot of sites on it and we see how it behaves under real load.

What you get that the cheap tiers don’t comes down to a few things that matter on the bad day. Server-level caching that handles dynamic requests properly, so a WooCommerce checkout doesn’t fall over under load. Isolated container resources, so noisy neighbors aren’t your problem. One-click staging that mirrors production, which is the gap between testing a plugin update safely and testing it on your paying customers. Free SSL, a real CDN. Daily automated backups with one-click restore. And support staffed by people who can actually read a slow-query log and answer in minutes, not days.

Cost is the part people brace for, then relax about. A well-built WordPress site or store on Kinsta runs roughly US$35 to $200 a month all-in for the vast majority of business sites. Their starter tier sits near $35; a busy WooCommerce store with a CDN and real order volume lands higher. That’s more than shared and less than a properly staffed VPS once you count the labor. For a site that takes orders or generates leads, it is the cheapest reliable option, not the most expensive one. The math only looks bad if you compare it to the sticker price of shared and ignore everything shared doesn’t do.

Managed isn’t infinitely flexible, and that’s the deal. You generally can’t run arbitrary services next to WordPress. Kinsta also disallows a list of plugins that fight its own infrastructure: caching plugins like W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache, and some backup plugins, because the platform already does both jobs better at the server level. For a business site or a WooCommerce store, those constraints are a feature. They stop people from breaking things.

The decision tree we actually run

When a client asks where their site should live, we don’t start with the host. We start with two questions. Does this site make money or generate leads? And who is going to maintain the server? The answers route almost every project.

1. Does the site make money, take orders, or generate leads? If yes, it goes on managed WordPress. The downtime cost of anything cheaper outruns the savings inside one bad week. This covers nearly every client build we ship, and every WooCommerce store without exception.
2. Is it a brochure site with no revenue, or a throwaway? A small marketing site for a business that gets its leads from referrals, a personal blog, a staging box you’ll delete next month. Cheaper tiers are honestly fine here. We won’t pretend a static five-page site needs a $200 platform.
3. Do you have real ops capability and a reason to control the stack? A team with a sysadmin, an unusual architecture, a service that has to run beside WordPress. That’s a VPS, ideally on RunCloud or GridPane so it doesn’t rot.
4. Can you write the one sentence that requires single-tenant hardware? Compliance, data residency, or traffic that genuinely outgrows a managed plan. Then, and only then, dedicated.

In practice the tree collapses fast. The overwhelming majority of serious business sites and stores land on managed WordPress. A small number of revenue-free or throwaway sites land on shared. VPS and dedicated are exceptions we reach for when there’s a specific reason we can name. We don’t pick a host to be clever. We pick the one that disappears, so the client never has to think about it again.

What good managed hosting actually buys you

Here’s the thing nobody puts on the pricing page. Managed hosting is mostly insurance against the bad day. The plugin update that takes the site down, except you restore from this morning’s backup in two clicks. The traffic spike from a newsletter feature, absorbed by server-level cache while you sleep. The brute-force run at wp-login, blocked at the platform edge before Wordfence even has to think about it. The outage that resolves itself because the host’s people are watching, not yours.

You pair it with the right stack on top. WP Rocket or the host’s own caching, Cloudflare in front, Wordfence on the application layer, ShipStation and Klaviyo wired into the store. Then the site runs quietly for years. That’s the whole goal: a site you forget about, because it never gives you a reason to remember it.

If you’re standing in front of this decision now and the cheap plan is tempting, ask the only question that matters. If this site went down for a day, would it cost me more than a year of better hosting? For anything that makes money, the answer is yes, and it isn’t close. Spend the $35 to $200 and move on. If you’d rather we spec the host and build it properly, that’s most of what we do. Tell us about the project.