Hosting
Shared hosting vs VPS
Shared hosting is cheaper and requires no administration; a VPS gives you root access, predictable resources and control over the server configuration. Most small business sites are fine on shared hosting until they need a setting the provider will not allow.
Side by side
| Compared on | Shared hosting | VPS |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | A few pounds a month | Several times that, plus your time |
| Administration | None — the provider handles it | Yours, including security updates |
| Resources | Shared with hundreds of sites | Allocated to you |
| Configuration control | Whatever the panel exposes | Complete |
| Edge rules and crawler blocking | The provider decides | You decide |
| Recovery when it breaks | Raise a ticket and wait | Yours to fix, immediately |
When Shared hosting is the right choice
- A brochure or small catalogue site with predictable traffic
- Nobody on the team wants to be responsible for server security updates
- The budget genuinely does not stretch further, and the alternative is no professional hosting
- The site is static and the server is barely doing anything
When VPS is the right choice
- The provider blocks crawlers, refuses headers, or applies rules you cannot override
- Traffic spikes exhaust a shared plan and pages start timing out
- You need a runtime version, extension or cron behaviour the panel does not expose
- Someone on the team can genuinely maintain it — an unpatched VPS is worse than shared hosting
The limit that usually forces the move
Not performance — control. This site’s host returns 403 to nine AI crawlers at its edge proxy, before robots.txt is read. No account setting changes it, and a custom domain does not either, because the rule matches on user-agent rather than host. That is the shape of the shared hosting ceiling: not slow, just not yours.
The cost people forget
A VPS is not the monthly fee; it is the monthly fee plus somebody keeping the operating system patched. An unmaintained VPS is a worse security position than shared hosting, where at least the provider applies updates. If nobody owns that job, the cheaper option is also the safer one.
The option in between
Managed hosting, or a static host with a CDN. Both give you more control than shared hosting without making you a system administrator, and for a static site the second is frequently free at small scale. The binary in the title is not the whole market.
The verdict
Stay on shared hosting until it stops you doing something specific. When it does, the honest next step for most small sites is managed or static hosting rather than a VPS, unless someone is genuinely available to administer a server.
If you want the full treatment
How to check whether AI crawlers can actually reach your site 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.