| Type | What it is | Typical cost | You manage | Suits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shared | Your site is one of hundreds on a server, sharing CPU and memory | £2–£10/mo | Just your site | Brochure sites, blogs, first projects |
| Managed WordPress | Shared or cloud tuned exclusively for WordPress, with updates, caching, staging and backups handled | £15–£100/mo | Content and plugins | Business sites where downtime costs money |
| VPS | A guaranteed slice of a physical server with root access | £4–£40/mo | The whole operating system | Developers, multiple sites, custom stacks |
| Cloud / IaaS | VPS that scales on demand, billed by the hour | £5–£∞/mo | The whole operating system | Variable traffic, infrastructure-as-code |
| Dedicated | An entire physical machine, yours alone | £40–£300/mo | Everything above the hardware | High traffic, heavy databases, compliance |
| Site builder | Hosting plus a proprietary editor; no server, no export | £8–£25/mo | Nothing technical | Non-technical owners who want it done |
| Static / Jamstack | Pre-built HTML served from a global edge network | £0–£15/mo | A build pipeline | Docs, marketing sites, headless front ends |
| Reseller | A slice you subdivide and sell on to clients | £15–£50/mo | Your clients' accounts | Agencies and freelancers |
Signs you have outgrown shared hosting
- Your host emails about CPU or entry-process limits, or throttles you at busy times.
- TTFB is over 600ms even with page caching enabled and working.
- You need a specific PHP extension, a queue worker, Redis, or a cron job finer than the panel allows.
- You are running WooCommerce with real order volume — carts and checkouts cannot be page-cached, so they hit PHP and the database every time.
- You are hosting more than about ten client sites and want isolation between them.
The honest middle path
Most people who think they need a VPS actually want VPS performance without VPS responsibility. That is exactly what Cloudways, or managed WordPress hosts like Kinsta and WP Engine, sell. Run your own server only if you genuinely want to — the ongoing security and backup work is the real cost, not the monthly fee.