Developers dismiss it, review sites upsell past it, and it remains the correct answer for a large majority of websites. The case for the unglamorous option.
Shared hosting has an image problem. Developers associate it with oversold nodes and cPanel screenshots from 2009; review sites push past it because the commission on a managed plan is higher; and the £1.99 end of the market has done the category's reputation no favours at all.
Meanwhile it remains the right answer for most of the websites that exist.
What shared hosting actually is now
The stereotype is a thousand sites fighting over a spinning disk. The reality at a decent host in 2026 is NVMe storage, LiteSpeed or nginx with server-level page caching, PHP 8.3, free SSL, daily backups you can restore yourself, staging, a free CDN and containerised isolation between accounts. That is a materially better stack than most self-managed VPSes are configured with, because the host tunes it full-time and you would be doing it once, from a tutorial.
The performance argument is mostly wrong
A cached WordPress page on good shared hosting is served as a static file from RAM in a few milliseconds. The visitor cannot tell it apart from the same page on a £30/month plan, because at that point the bottleneck is the network and the browser, not the server.
Where shared hosting genuinely falls down is uncached, concurrent PHP — a busy WooCommerce checkout, a membership site, a forum where everyone is logged in. That is a real limitation and a real reason to move up. It is not most websites. A brochure site, a blog, a portfolio, a local business site, a charity site, a documentation site: all of these are almost entirely cacheable and none of them will ever notice the ceiling.
What you are actually buying
The underrated part is that somebody else owns the operating system. Kernel patches, PHP updates, mail configuration, firewall rules, TLS renewal, intrusion monitoring — all handled, none of it your evening. Our VPS versus managed comparison puts numbers on that: a £4 Hetzner box saves about £25/month and costs a few hours a year in the good case, plus one bad evening in the bad one.
For a £6/month shared plan at Krystal or 34SP, that entire category of work is someone else's problem, and there is a UK support team to ask when it is not.
When to move up, honestly
| Situation | Move to |
|---|---|
| Ecommerce with real order volume | Managed WordPress/WooCommerce or Cloudways |
| Logged-in users at any scale | VPS or managed cloud with object caching |
| Resource-limit emails from your host | A bigger plan first, then a VPS |
| You need Redis, a queue worker, or custom extensions | VPS |
| Ten or more client sites | Reseller platform or your own server |
| Downtime costs money by the hour | Managed hosting with a real SLA |
Notice that none of those triggers is "my site feels a bit slow". That is nearly always caching, images or a page builder, and moving hosts will not fix it.
The one thing to get right
Buy shared hosting from a host with honest renewal pricing rather than the cheapest advertised rate. The difference between good shared hosting and bad shared hosting is much larger than the difference between good shared hosting and a VPS — and it costs about four pounds a month.
There is a persistent idea that competence means running your own server. For a professional whose job is servers, sure. For everyone else, the sophisticated choice is to pay six pounds a month, let someone else patch the kernel, and spend the recovered time on the actual business.
Published 30 May 2026. Prices and ownership change — check the comparison table for current figures, and the provider's own site before buying. No affiliate links anywhere on this site.