Shared vs Managed vs VPS Hosting: Which One Does Your Site Need?
A plain-English rule for choosing a hosting tier, with the traffic and revenue numbers where each stops making sense.
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Hosting tiers are about what happens when your site is busy. On shared hosting you split a server with hundreds of other sites; managed WordPress adds caching and a team that keeps WordPress updated; a VPS gives you a fixed slice of CPU and memory that nobody else can use.
Shared: most sites, under about 50,000 visits a month
Blogs, portfolios, small business sites and new stores belong here. The hosts in our ranking held 99.97–99.99% uptime on shared plans and served a cached WordPress page in 220–320 ms from US-East. The trade-off is noisy neighbours: a spike on another account can slow yours.
Managed WordPress: when time matters more than money
Kinsta and the managed tiers at SiteGround and DreamHost handle updates, backups, staging and caching. Kinsta was the fastest host we measured. Pay for it when the site earns enough that an hour of your time costs more than the plan.
VPS: stores and apps that must stay fast under load
A managed VPS from ScalaHosting or InMotion starts around $30 a month and gives WooCommerce checkout consistent speed at 5 pm on Black Friday. Unmanaged VPS is cheaper but you patch the server yourself.
The rule
Start shared. Move to managed when updates and backups become your job. Move to VPS when the checkout slows down under traffic.
» See the full rankings: Best Web Hosting of 2026 .