Hosting
Shared hosting vs a CDN platform
For a static site, a CDN platform wins on every measurable axis and costs nothing: HTTP/3, Brotli, global edge delivery and automatic TLS. Shared hosting wins when you need PHP, a database, email hosting or cPanel — which a dynamic site does.
Side by side
| Compared on | Shared hosting | CDN platform |
|---|---|---|
| Cost for a static site | A few pounds a month | Free on most tiers |
| Protocol support | Often HTTP/1.1 only | HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 |
| Compression | Frequently gzip only | Brotli |
| Time to first byte | Single origin, hundreds of ms | Edge, tens of ms |
| Runs PHP and MySQL | Yes | No |
| Crawler denylists at the edge | Sometimes, invisibly | Generally none |
When Shared hosting is the right choice
- The site runs PHP with a database — WordPress, WooCommerce, a custom app
- You need email hosting on the same account
- You want cPanel and file-manager access
- A client already pays for it and it is adequate
When a CDN platform is the right choice
- The site is statically generated
- Performance matters and you do not want to tune a server
- You want git-based deploys rather than FTP
- Your current host blocks AI crawlers at its edge
The failure mode nobody checks for
Some shared hosts run edge proxies that return 403 to AI crawler user-agents before your server is reached. Your robots.txt is never consulted, nothing in the control panel mentions it, and the site works perfectly in a browser. Test by fetching with each user-agent.
The hybrid that suits most small businesses
Static marketing site on a CDN platform, and a small shared-hosting account for a form handler or anything needing PHP. Both free or nearly so, and it removes the single-origin bottleneck from the pages that matter.
The verdict
Static site: CDN platform, every time. Dynamic site: shared hosting, but test what its edge does to crawlers before assuming your robots.txt is being read.
If you want the full treatment
Core Web Vitals, and the order that actually reduces them covers this in about 3 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.
Who wrote this comparison
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. Where a comparison involves something I sell, the page says so — and every comparison here has to name at least two situations where each side wins, because a comparison one option always wins is an advert with a table in it.