Shared hosting or the cloud — which suits your site?
Published
The platform choice comes down to what the site has to do, not which option sounds more modern. A brochure site and a site running bookings need different things.
When a website is commissioned, the platform is usually the part nobody thinks about. It arrives with the quote, costs ten euros a month and is forgotten — until something stops working. The choice is not a matter of taste, though. It follows from what the site has to do.
Two options
Shared hosting is the traditional shared server running PHP and a database. You pay a fixed monthly fee, typically €5–15, and get an environment that can run code which stores and reads data.
Static publishing means the pages are built in advance and served from a network close to the visitor. No server code runs during a request, so there is no server to maintain and running costs stay close to zero.
When static is enough
If the site says who you are, what you do and how to reach you, it does not need a database. An introduction, a list of services, a blog and a contact form work well as static pages, and the result is faster and cheaper than shared hosting.
When shared hosting is the right call
As soon as the site has to remember something: take bookings, show free slots, send a reminder before an appointment, or let you change prices and opening hours yourself. That needs a database and code running during the request, and ordinary shared hosting handles it perfectly well.
Shared hosting has its limits. The server is one machine in one location, shared with other sites, so a neighbour's traffic spike can slow yours down. Software needs updating, and backups need looking after.
None of that is a reason to avoid shared hosting. It is a reason to keep the build light: the fewer parts a site has, the less there is to update and the less there is to break. A site resting on ten plugins is fragile in any environment.
How I choose
I start by asking what the site has to do. If the answer is "say what we do and how to reach us", I build it static. If the answer involves booking, a price list you maintain yourself or any other transaction, I build it for shared hosting with a database — without a heavyweight publishing system and without paid plugins.
Either way the site is yours: the domain and subscriptions in your name, the content yours, and the source code handed over on request.