Which hosting for an SMB site: shared, VPS or managed WP.
For 90 percent of SMB sites, managed WordPress (Kinsta, WP Engine, Pressable, Cloudways) is the right home. Shared is cheap pain, VPS is overkill without devops skills.
Try this first
- 1Map requirements: monthly visitors, e-commerce yes/no, custom code, peak load (Black Friday).
- 2Shared: cheap, fine for brochure sites, cracks under load. No staging, limited control.
- 3Managed WordPress: premium pricing, built-in caching, staging, daily backups, support that actually knows WP.
- 4VPS or dedicated (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, AWS): cheaper at scale, but you pay in time for updates, security and monitoring. Not an option without admin skill.
- 5For shops: lean toward managed WP or a WooCommerce-specific host. Shared with hundreds of products is asking for problems.
- 6Test before you sign: trial account, import a real database, run Lighthouse. Marketing pages lie, a trial doesn't.
When to bring us in
International audience, a complex stack, or compliance demands? Cloudways or an AWS setup with a devops agency, not shared.
See also
- WordPress, plugins and theme have gone 6+ months without updatesOut-of-date WP is the number-one entry for malware. Don't just hit 'update all', back up first.
- Theme update broke the layout or threw a fatal errorThemes overwrite custom CSS on update unless you use a child theme.
- WordPress shows a blank screen after a plugin install or updateWSOD (white screen of death) is usually one crashing plugin. You isolate it.
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