People usually ask "is a VPS better than shared hosting?" as if there were one answer. There isn't. Each of the four options wins somewhere, and a VPS (which is what we sell) loses in a few places that are worth knowing before you pay for one.
Here's the comparison we'd give a friend.
The short version
| Shared hosting | VPS | Dedicated server | Cloud platform | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you rent | an account on someone's server | a virtual machine with root | a whole physical machine | building blocks billed by use |
| Who maintains the OS | the host | you | you | you, or managed services |
| Can run any software | no | yes | yes | yes |
| Price model | fixed, lowest | fixed monthly | fixed, highest | per use |
| Setup time | minutes | about a minute | hours to days | minutes |
| Scales by | changing package | resizing the plan | buying another machine | automatically, if you build it |
Shared hosting: honestly the better deal for a simple site
If you have a WordPress blog, a brochure site or a small PHP shop with modest traffic, shared hosting is hard to beat. It's cheap, the host patches the server, mailboxes and backups usually come in the package, and there's a control panel instead of a terminal.
What you give up: no root, no long-running processes, no custom software, limits on CPU and memory per account that you'll only discover when you hit them, and neighbours whose traffic spikes become your slow afternoon. The moment you need a bot, a background worker, a different language runtime or your own firewall rules, shared hosting stops being an option rather than just a cheaper one.
VPS: control at a fixed price
A VPS is a virtual machine with root. You install what you want, run processes around the clock, open the ports you need and pay a fixed price every month. That's why it's the default home for bots, AI agents, APIs, VPNs, self-hosted tools and most small production apps. Plans here run from Nano at $3 a month (NAT, 2 vCPU, 1 GB) up to 80 GB of RAM on the Pro line, and a VPS with its own IPv4 starts at $8. The full list is on the VPS page.
Now the parts where a VPS is worse, written plainly:
- You are the sysadmin. Security updates, a firewall, monitoring and log rotation are your job. If nobody on the team will do that, a VPS will quietly rot.
- Backups aren't automatic. Here they're an add-on on monthly plans and included on annual ones (how backups work), but you have to know to turn them on. On shared hosting they're usually just there.
- vCPU is shared. The vCPU count is a ceiling for bursts, not dedicated physical cores. Short spikes are fine; hours of full load may be throttled. A dedicated server doesn't have this problem.
- No autoscaling. If traffic grows tenfold overnight, a VPS doesn't grow with it. You resize it, and resizing means a reboot.
- One machine, one location. Our servers are in Germany and Finland. If you need your app close to users on three continents, a single VPS won't do that.
Dedicated server: when you need the whole machine
A dedicated server is a physical box that's only yours. You get every core all the time, the full disk throughput, hardware you can choose, and nobody else's workload anywhere near yours. That matters for sustained CPU work, heavy databases with constant disk I/O, and the occasional compliance rule that forbids sharing hardware.
The costs: a higher fixed price, setup measured in hours or days rather than seconds, and when a disk dies it's your service that stops while it gets replaced. Resizing means new hardware.
We don't rent out whole physical servers. If what you need is lots of memory rather than lots of sustained CPU, the Pro plans (32 to 80 GB of RAM) cover much of what people buy dedicated servers for, and when you actually need 64 GB of RAM helps you check whether you're one of them.
Cloud platforms: building blocks with a meter
The big cloud platforms sell parts: virtual machines, managed databases, object storage, queues, load balancers, functions. You pay per second or per request, you can autoscale, and you can run in many regions at once. For a team that needs a managed database with failover, or traffic that goes from zero to huge and back, that's genuinely the right tool.
The trade-offs are complexity and the bill. Pricing has many dimensions (compute, storage, requests, and especially outbound traffic), so a monthly cost is harder to predict, and a misconfigured service can surprise you. For a single always-on app with steady load, a fixed-price VPS usually costs a fraction of the same setup on a metered platform.
So which one?
- One simple website, no special software: shared hosting.
- Bots, agents, APIs, VPNs, self-hosted tools, a small production app: VPS.
- Sustained full-CPU work, heavy disk I/O, hardware or compliance requirements: dedicated server.
- Managed databases, autoscaling, many regions, a team to run it: cloud platform.
Where this comparison doesn't fit
The lines blur. Some "shared" hosts give you SSH, some VPS providers include managed updates, and some cloud platforms sell plain fixed-price servers. Judge the offer, not the label. And if the real question is which VPS to pick rather than whether to pick one, read how to read VPS specs next. If you're leaving shared hosting for a VPS, moving without downtime has the checklist.
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