What Is Shared, VPS, Dedicated, and Cloud Hosting? One Clear Guide

Ask ten hosting companies to explain types of web hosting and you will get ten different answers, most of them designed to steer you toward whatever plan has the highest margin rather than whatever plan actually fits your website. The terminology alone is enough to make a reasonable person close the browser tab: shared versus VPS versus dedicated versus cloud — four phrases that sound like they belong in an enterprise IT procurement meeting but that actually describe a simple spectrum of how much server space you get and how much it costs. At Hosting Captain, we have spent years translating this exact question for people who just want their website to work, and the framework we have developed boils every hosting type down to a real-world analogy, a price range, and a clear answer to the question "who is this actually for?"

This guide walks through all four major hosting types in the order you will encounter them as your site grows. We start with shared hosting — where everyone begins — and progress through VPS hosting, dedicated servers, and cloud hosting, explaining what each one actually is beneath the marketing jargon, what you can expect to pay in 2026, which type of website belongs on which type of hosting, and how the upgrade path between them works in practice. If you are completely new to the concept of web hosting itself and need the absolute basics first — what a server is, how a domain connects to it, why any of this exists — that guide provides the foundation. For a quick reference on the technical terms that appear throughout this article, our web hosting terms glossary defines bandwidth, uptime, SSL, and every other acronym you will encounter along the way.

Shared Hosting: The Apartment Building Where Everyone Starts

Shared hosting is a single physical server divided into hundreds — sometimes thousands — of accounts, each of which runs its own website. Think of a large apartment building. The building itself provides the essential infrastructure: electricity, water, a mailing address, a locked front door. Every tenant gets their own unit with a private space to arrange furniture and hang pictures, but the walls are shared, the parking lot is shared, and if the neighbor in unit 4B throws an all-night party, everyone on the floor hears it. In hosting terms, the apartment building is the physical server sitting in a data center somewhere; your website is one of the units. You get your own files, your own database, your own email accounts, and your own control panel login, but the server's CPU cores, RAM, storage drives, and network connection are divided across every account on the machine. When your neighbor's poorly optimized WordPress plugin consumes 90% of the server's CPU for three hours, your website loads slowly — or does not load at all — through no fault of your own. This is the noisy-neighbor problem, and it is the defining trade-off of shared hosting: the price is low because the resources are shared, and the performance is variable because everyone else's traffic affects everyone else's experience.

Shared hosting plans in 2026 range from roughly $1.50 to $15 per month at renewal, with introductory pricing frequently dropping below $3 per month for the first term. At the low end of that range — the $1.50 to $5 tier — you receive enough storage (10 GB to 50 GB on solid-state drives), enough bandwidth (typically unmetered under a fair-use policy), and enough server power to run a personal blog, a portfolio site, a small business brochure website, or a local service business landing page with traffic in the low thousands of monthly visitors. SSL certificates are universally included at no extra charge through automated provisioning systems like Let's Encrypt, meaning your site serves over HTTPS from the moment it goes live. A custom domain — your own .com, .org, or country-code address — is either included free for the first year or available for purchase at the standard registry price. One-click installers like Softaculous provide push-button deployment of WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and dozens of other applications, which means you can go from signing up to having a working website in under thirty minutes without touching a command line or editing a configuration file. For the overwhelming majority of first-time website owners, shared hosting is the correct starting point, and it will serve them well for the first year or two of their site's life. Our complete shared hosting guide covers plan selection, provider comparison, and the specific signals that indicate when you have outgrown shared resources and are ready for the next tier.

Who shared hosting is for: anyone launching their first website, small business owners whose site is a digital brochure rather than a revenue engine, bloggers building an audience from zero, portfolio sites for freelancers and creatives, hobby project sites, and anyone who needs a functional, credible web presence for under $100 per year. Who shared hosting is not for: e-commerce stores processing more than a handful of orders per day, membership sites with hundreds of simultaneous logged-in users, web applications that run server-side processing on every request, and any site where ten minutes of downtime during a traffic spike would cost you meaningful revenue. The upgrade threshold from shared hosting to a VPS is typically reached when you start seeing resource limit warnings in your control panel — CPU throttling notifications, memory exhaustion errors, database connection failures — or when your site's page load times become unacceptably slow during peak traffic hours despite having optimized your images, enabled caching, and configured a CDN.

VPS Hosting: The Townhouse With Your Own Walls

A Virtual Private Server, universally abbreviated as VPS, is the hosting equivalent of a townhouse: you share the physical structure — the building, the foundation, the utility hookups — with a few neighbors, but you have your own walls, your own front door, your own climate control, and a guaranteed amount of space that nobody else can encroach upon. Technically, a VPS is a virtual machine carved out of a physical server by a hypervisor — a piece of software, typically KVM or Xen, that partitions one physical computer into multiple isolated virtual computers. Unlike shared hosting where every account competes for the same pool of server resources, a VPS receives a dedicated allocation: 2 vCPUs that are yours, 4 GB of RAM that is yours, 80 GB of SSD storage that is yours. The physical server still hosts multiple VPS instances — your townhouse shares walls with other townhouses — but the hypervisor enforces strict resource boundaries that prevent any single VPS from consuming resources allocated to another. If the VPS next to yours experiences a traffic spike that saturates its own CPU allocation, your VPS is unaffected because its vCPUs are scheduled independently and its RAM is physically partitioned at the hypervisor level.

The defining upgrade from shared hosting to VPS hosting is not merely more resources — it is control. On a VPS, you receive root access to a full operating system installation, typically Ubuntu, CentOS, AlmaLinux, or Debian. Root access means you can install any software, configure any server setting, compile any programming language runtime, and customize any aspect of the server's behavior. You can run multiple websites on a single VPS using virtual host configuration, install Node.js alongside PHP for a mixed-technology stack, set up Redis or Memcached for in-memory caching, and configure database servers with custom buffer pool sizes and query cache settings that would be impossible on shared hosting. You are also responsible for the consequences of that control: operating system updates, security hardening, firewall configuration, backup automation, and monitoring are your job on an unmanaged VPS, though many hosting providers offer managed VPS plans where the support team handles the OS-level maintenance while you retain application-level control.

VPS pricing in 2026 spans a wide range because the plans themselves span a wide range. An entry-level VPS with 1 to 2 vCPUs, 2 to 4 GB of RAM, and 40 to 80 GB of NVMe storage runs $5 to $25 per month at reputable providers. A mid-range VPS with 4 to 8 vCPUs, 8 to 16 GB of RAM, and 160 to 320 GB of storage runs $30 to $80 per month. A high-end VPS approaching dedicated-server territory with 12 to 16 vCPUs, 32 to 64 GB of RAM, and 400 to 800 GB of storage runs $100 to $200 per month. The price variation across providers at the same spec level reflects differences in the underlying hardware generation, the quality of the network uplink, whether storage is locally attached NVMe or network-attached block storage, and whether the plan includes management services like automated backups, proactive monitoring, and support-assisted troubleshooting. For a detailed comparison of how VPS plans differ from dedicated server offerings — and when renting a full physical machine makes more sense than a large virtual one — our dedicated server guide explores the crossover point in depth.

Who VPS hosting is for: growing websites that have outgrown shared hosting resource limits, small-to-medium e-commerce stores processing dozens to hundreds of orders per day, SaaS applications with a user base in the low thousands, web developers and agencies hosting multiple client sites on a single server, forums and membership communities with concurrent user counts in the dozens to hundreds, game servers (Minecraft, Counter-Strike, Valheim), and any application that needs custom server software or non-standard PHP extensions that shared hosting providers do not support. Who VPS hosting is not for: absolute beginners who have never configured a server before (unless they choose a fully managed plan), sites that need guaranteed hardware-level isolation for compliance reasons, and workloads that require consistent bare-metal CPU performance with zero hypervisor overhead for sustained compute-intensive tasks like video encoding or machine learning inference.

Dedicated Hosting: The Single-Family Home on Its Own Land

A dedicated server is exactly what it sounds like: a physical computer — a real machine made of metal, silicon, and circuit boards sitting in a data center rack — that is leased entirely to you. Nobody else's website runs on it. Nobody else's database shares its memory. Nobody else's traffic spike can slow down your CPU or saturate your network port. In the housing analogy, a dedicated server is a detached single-family home on its own plot of land. You are not sharing walls, you are not sharing a parking lot, and if you decide to install a swimming pool or build a workshop in the backyard, you do not need permission from a landlord or a homeowners' association. The server's CPU cores — real physical cores, not virtualized vCPUs — run only your workloads. The RAM modules installed in the motherboard's DIMM slots hold only your data. The NVMe drives connected directly to the CPU's PCIe lanes store only your files and databases.

The architectural difference between a VPS and a dedicated server is the hypervisor layer. On a VPS, every CPU instruction passes through the hypervisor, which schedules virtual CPUs across physical cores and translates memory addresses through shadow page tables. This virtualization overhead imposes a 5% to 15% performance penalty for CPU-bound workloads and a 10% to 30% penalty for I/O-heavy workloads compared to identical hardware running bare metal. On a dedicated server, that overhead is zero — your operating system boots directly on the hardware, your applications run directly on the CPU, and your database reads and writes travel an unimpeded path from the application through the OS kernel to the NVMe controller. The practical result is that a dedicated server with 8 physical cores consistently outperforms a VPS with 8 vCPUs, even when the underlying hardware is identical, because the VPS is always sharing those physical cores with other virtual machines and contending with the hypervisor's scheduling decisions.

Dedicated server pricing in 2026 has compressed significantly compared to five years ago, driven by competition from cloud platforms and the relentless improvement in server hardware price-to-performance ratios. An entry-level dedicated server — typically a last-generation Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC processor with 4 to 8 cores, 16 to 32 GB of ECC RAM, and dual enterprise SSDs or NVMe drives in RAID-1 — starts at $70 to $150 per month. A mid-range server built on current-generation hardware with 12 to 24 cores, 64 to 128 GB of RAM, and multiple NVMe drives delivering 500,000+ random read IOPS runs $200 to $500 per month. High-end configurations with dual processors, 256 GB to 1 TB of RAM, GPU accelerators, and 10 Gbps dedicated network ports can exceed $1,000 per month. The management layer adds significant cost variance: an unmanaged dedicated server at $100 per month requires you to handle operating system updates, security patches, firewall configuration, backup scheduling, and hardware failure response yourself, while a fully managed dedicated server at $150 to $300 per month bundles those responsibilities into the price and provides a support team that monitors the hardware, applies patches, configures firewalls, and responds to incidents around the clock. For clarity on what a hosting SLA actually guarantees — and why the terms of an SLA matter at least as much as the uptime percentage it advertises — that guide explains the fine print that separates meaningful guarantees from marketing language.

Who dedicated hosting is for: e-commerce stores processing hundreds to thousands of orders per day where every minute of downtime costs revenue, SaaS platforms with thousands to tens of thousands of monthly active users, database-heavy applications where storage I/O consistency directly determines query performance, agencies managing 30 to 100 client websites under a single server, media streaming platforms serving large files to a global audience, organizations subject to PCI-DSS, HIPAA, or other compliance frameworks that require single-tenant physical infrastructure, and any business where the monthly hosting cost is a rounding error compared to the revenue the website generates. Who dedicated hosting is not for: anyone whose website fits comfortably on a VPS (which describes most websites), early-stage startups conserving capital for product development, projects with highly variable traffic that would waste dedicated resources during quiet periods, and teams that lack either the technical expertise to manage a server or the budget for a managed plan.

Cloud Hosting: The Flexible Co-Working Space That Scales on Demand

Cloud hosting is the hardest hosting type to define concisely because the term has been stretched to cover everything from genuine distributed infrastructure platforms to rebranded traditional VPS offerings with a new CSS theme on the pricing page. At its core, genuine cloud hosting means your website or application runs on a cluster of servers rather than on a single physical machine, with your data replicated across multiple physical storage nodes so that the failure of any single server does not take your site offline. In the analogy framework, cloud hosting is a co-working space: you do not have a fixed desk, but you have guaranteed access to a desk somewhere in the building whenever you need one, and if one floor of the building loses power, the staff moves your laptop to a different floor and you keep working with minimal interruption. Unlike a dedicated server where your site lives on one specific piece of hardware that represents a single point of failure, a cloud-hosted site has its files and database distributed across a storage cluster, and the compute layer — the processing power that runs your application — is drawn from a pool of hypervisor nodes where any available server can run your instance.

The architectural capabilities that distinguish genuine cloud hosting from rebranded VPS hosting are live migration, automated failover, and API-driven provisioning. Live migration means the cloud platform can move your running virtual server from one physical machine to another without shutting it down — the hypervisor copies your server's memory pages from the source node to the destination node over a high-speed internal network, then switches execution to the destination with a pause measured in milliseconds rather than minutes. This allows the provider to perform hardware maintenance, replace aging components, and balance load across the cluster without any scheduled downtime for your website. Automated failover means that if the physical server running your instance suffers a hardware failure — a blown power supply, a failed RAID controller, a dead motherboard — the cloud platform's control plane detects the failure within seconds, selects a healthy server from the available pool, reattaches your distributed storage volumes to the new server, and boots your instance, typically within 60 to 180 seconds of the failure. API-driven provisioning means every operation — creating a server, resizing it, snapshotting it, cloning it, attaching block storage, configuring firewalls — is accessible through a REST API and infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform and Pulumi, enabling automated deployment pipelines that spin up staging environments on demand and tear them down when testing is complete.

Cloud hosting pricing is the most variable of the four hosting types because it is typically metered by the hour rather than sold as a fixed monthly plan. A small cloud instance with 1 vCPU, 1 to 2 GB of RAM, and 25 to 50 GB of storage costs $4 to $6 per month when run continuously — comparable to entry-level shared hosting but with far more control and without the noisy-neighbor risks. A mid-range cloud instance equivalent to a capable VPS — 4 vCPUs, 8 GB of RAM, 160 GB of storage — costs $20 to $40 per month when run 24/7. The pricing model's flexibility is its economic advantage: you can spin up a large instance with 16 vCPUs and 64 GB of RAM for a batch processing job, run it for four hours, and pay only for those four hours rather than for an entire month. Development environments can be scheduled to shut down automatically outside business hours, reducing their monthly cost by 55% to 65%. However, cloud pricing also carries a risk that fixed-plan hosting does not: data transfer costs. Cloud providers typically include a modest free transfer allowance — 1 to 5 TB per month — and charge $0.01 to $0.12 per GB for outbound data beyond that allowance. A media-heavy website serving 15 TB of content per month could incur $100 to $1,500 per month in bandwidth charges on top of the compute instance cost, making the total cloud bill far higher than the per-hour rate would suggest. Always model your expected data transfer volume against the provider's bandwidth pricing before comparing cloud costs to fixed-plan alternatives.

Who cloud hosting is for: SaaS platforms that need to scale compute resources up and down in response to demand, startups that want to preserve capital by paying only for what they use, development teams practicing infrastructure-as-code with automated CI/CD pipelines, websites with highly variable traffic patterns (seasonal e-commerce, event-driven media sites, campaigns), globally distributed applications that need low-latency presence in multiple continents, and any project where the cost of downtime significantly exceeds the cloud hosting premium. Who cloud hosting is not for: fixed-workload sites with predictable traffic that would waste the cloud's flexibility premium, budget-constrained projects where a traditional VPS or shared hosting plan at half the price provides all the needed capability, and anyone who needs maximum raw single-instance disk I/O performance — locally attached NVMe on a dedicated server or traditional VPS consistently outperforms network-attached cloud block storage on IOPS-per-dollar benchmarks.

Side-by-Side Comparison: The Four Hosting Types at a Glance

The table below collapses the most important differences between shared, VPS, dedicated, and cloud hosting into a format you can scan in thirty seconds and reference later when you are comparing plans. The pricing ranges reflect renewal rates in mid-2026 across reputable providers in each category — not introductory discounts that expire after the first term.

This table captures the dimensions that matter in purchase decisions, but it cannot capture the edge cases that often determine the right answer for a specific project. An e-commerce store processing $2,000 per day in revenue might technically fit within a high-end VPS plan on paper, but the dedicated server's immunity to noisy-neighbor performance degradation and its superior storage I/O consistency for database queries during checkout could make the $150-per-month premium the highest-return infrastructure investment that business ever makes. Conversely, a SaaS startup with five paying customers and uncertain growth trajectory should almost certainly start on cloud or VPS hosting and only commit to dedicated hardware when the revenue justifies the fixed cost. The decision framework in section 7 walks through how to weight these dimensions for your specific situation.

The Upgrade Path: How to Move Between Hosting Types as You Grow

Your first hosting decision is not your last hosting decision. Every successful website follows a trajectory that eventually outgrows its initial infrastructure, and understanding the upgrade paths between hosting types — what they involve technically, how much they cost operationally, and when to pull the trigger — prevents the painful situation of discovering you need to migrate during a traffic spike when every hour of downtime costs revenue and credibility. The upgrade path described below follows the natural progression from shared hosting through VPS or cloud hosting to dedicated infrastructure, and we have organized it to help you recognize the signals that indicate it is time to move to the next tier.

Shared Hosting to VPS: The First Major Upgrade

This is the upgrade that the majority of growing websites will make, and it typically occurs between six months and three years after launching on shared hosting, depending on traffic growth rate. The signals that you have outgrown shared hosting are specific and observable: your hosting control panel shows CPU throttling warnings, your site's error logs contain memory exhaustion messages, your database connection pool reaches its limit during traffic peaks and returns "too many connections" errors, and your page load times degrade unpredictably during certain hours of the day even though your traffic volume has not changed — a strong indicator that a noisy neighbor on the shared server is consuming disproportionate resources. When you see two or more of these signals simultaneously, the shared hosting environment has become a constraint on your growth, and migrating to a VPS is the correct next step. The migration itself involves provisioning a VPS plan, installing your content management system and any necessary server software, copying your files and database, testing the new environment thoroughly, and updating your domain's DNS records to point to the new server's IP address. Most hosting providers offer free migration assistance for customers moving from shared to VPS plans within the same company, and even cross-provider migrations can be completed in under two hours with proper preparation. For a step-by-step migration guide that covers the file transfer, database synchronization, DNS propagation, and post-migration testing phases in detail, our shared-to-VPS migration guide walks through the entire process with the specific commands and configuration files you will need.

VPS to Dedicated Server: When Virtualization Overhead Becomes a Bottleneck

Moving from a VPS to a dedicated server is a decision driven by one of three factors: raw performance ceilings, compliance requirements, or cost efficiency at scale. On the performance front, a VPS running at 70% or higher sustained CPU utilization, with your database showing I/O wait times above 50 milliseconds during normal operations, has reached the practical limit of what virtualized hardware can deliver — the hypervisor overhead that was absorbing 5% to 10% of CPU cycles at light load now consumes 20% or more under sustained heavy load because the hypervisor's scheduling overhead grows non-linearly with resource contention. On the compliance front, organizations subject to PCI-DSS, HIPAA, or SOC 2 audits often reach a point where the shared physical infrastructure of a VPS environment expands the audit scope unacceptably, and the single-tenant isolation of a dedicated server simplifies the compliance boundary. On the cost front, the pricing overlap between high-end VPS plans ($150 to $200 per month) and entry-level dedicated servers ($100 to $150 per month) means that at a certain scale, you can move to dedicated hardware and gain 2x to 4x the CPU performance, 3x to 5x the storage I/O throughput, and eliminate noisy-neighbor risk — all for the same or lower monthly cost. The migration from VPS to dedicated server is operationally simpler than the shared-to-VPS migration in many respects because both environments provide root access, both run full operating system installations, and your application stack should transfer with minimal reconfiguration. The primary difference is that your new dedicated hardware is uncontended from the first moment, and the performance improvement is often immediately visible in application benchmarks.

Cloud to Dedicated (and Back): Hybrid Architectures

The hosting industry in 2026 increasingly recognizes that sophisticated infrastructure is rarely a binary choice between hosting types. The most cost-effective architectures for growing businesses often blend two or more hosting models: a dedicated server runs the steady-state production database and application tier where predictable performance at predictable cost is the priority, while cloud instances provide burst capacity during traffic spikes, host staging and development environments that are only needed during business hours, and serve as geographically distributed edge nodes for latency-sensitive global audiences. This hybrid pattern — sometimes called the "baseline and burst" architecture — allows you to pay fixed monthly pricing for the resources you always need while retaining the cloud's elasticity for the resources you only need occasionally. The migration between cloud and dedicated infrastructure flows in both directions: businesses that started on cloud and grew to a scale where the monthly bill justifies dedicated hardware are increasingly repatriating workloads from cloud platforms to managed dedicated servers, a trend called cloud repatriation that typically reduces infrastructure cost by 40% to 60% for workloads with stable, predictable resource requirements. Conversely, businesses with dedicated infrastructure that need to add geographic regions, deploy ephemeral test environments, or handle short-term traffic spikes use cloud resources as overlays on their dedicated baseline. The skill is not in choosing one hosting type forever but in knowing where to draw the boundary between them for your current workload, and the boundary moves as your business grows.

How to Choose: A Practical Decision Framework

After years of advising clients at Hosting Captain on hosting type selection, we have distilled the decision into four questions that produce the right answer more reliably than any spec-sheet comparison. Answer these in order, and the hosting type that fits will surface naturally.

Question 1: What happens if your site goes down for four hours? If the honest answer is "minor inconvenience, nothing lost except time" — your site is a blog, a portfolio, a hobby project, a small business brochure page — then shared hosting or an entry-level VPS is appropriate, and you should not pay a premium for redundancy you do not need. If the honest answer is "we lose sales, customers call us, our reputation takes a hit" — your site is an e-commerce store, a SaaS application, a membership platform — then you need at minimum a cloud VPS with automated failover or a managed dedicated server with a strong uptime SLA, and the extra $30 to $100 per month is insurance against a failure mode that is statistically guaranteed to occur at least once over a multi-year hosting relationship. Every hosting hardware component — power supplies, drives, RAID controllers, motherboards, network switches — has a finite mean time between failure, and the probability of experiencing at least one hardware failure over a three-year period on a single-server architecture is not trivial. The question is whether you have engineered around it (cloud failover, redundant dedicated servers, application-level replication) or whether you are accepting the risk and the downtime that comes with it.

Question 2: How much traffic do you actually have, and is it predictable? If your site receives under 10,000 monthly visits with no significant spikes — the traffic graph looks like a gentle hill, not a mountain range — shared hosting or a small VPS is sufficient. If your traffic is between 10,000 and 100,000 monthly visits with moderate variability, a mid-range VPS or cloud instance is the appropriate platform. If your traffic exceeds 100,000 monthly visits or includes periodic spikes that are 5x to 50x your baseline — Black Friday for e-commerce, a product launch for SaaS, a viral post for media — you need the uncontended resources of a dedicated server for the baseline plus cloud burst capacity for the spikes, or a cloud-native architecture that can auto-scale within the spike itself. If you do not know your traffic numbers, install Google Analytics or a server-side analytics tool before making any hosting decision; buying infrastructure without traffic data is buying clothes without knowing your size.

Question 3: What is your monthly hosting budget, honestly? Be realistic about what you can afford on an ongoing basis — not the introductory price for the first year, but the renewal price for years two through five. A shared hosting plan at $8 per month costs $96 per year and $480 over five years. An entry-level VPS at $25 per month costs $300 per year and $1,500 over five years. A mid-range dedicated server at $200 per month costs $2,400 per year and $12,000 over five years. The hosting type you choose should fit within your operating budget with comfortable headroom, because the worst outcome for any website is being forced to downgrade hosting and migrate to a smaller platform under duress because the monthly bill became unaffordable. Start with the hosting type your budget comfortably supports, and upgrade only when the site's growth — measured in traffic, revenue, or both — justifies the increase.

Question 4: Who is handling the server administration? If the answer is "nobody — I need the host to handle everything," your options are shared hosting, managed VPS, managed cloud hosting, or managed dedicated server. The managed layer costs an additional $20 to $200 per month depending on the hosting type, and that cost either comes bundled into the plan price or is an explicit add-on. If the answer is "I have a developer or system administrator who handles server configuration," you can consider unmanaged VPS, unmanaged cloud, or unmanaged dedicated server plans, which strip out the management cost and reduce the monthly price by 30% to 60% in exchange for shifting the operational responsibility to your team. Be honest about your team's operational capacity: an unmanaged dedicated server at $100 per month looks economical on a spreadsheet until a drive fails at 2 a.m. and nobody on your team knows how to replace it or restore from backup. The right hosting type is the one your actual team can actually operate, not the one that looks most efficient in a theoretical cost model written by someone who assumes infinite technical competence.

Once you have answered these four questions, you will find that one or at most two hosting types emerge as the clear match for your situation. If you are still uncertain between two adjacent types — shared versus entry-level VPS, high-end VPS versus entry-level dedicated — err on the side of the lower tier and set up monitoring to track CPU utilization, memory consumption, and page load times. The data will tell you definitively when it is time to upgrade, and upgrading too late (after spending a few months with suboptimal performance) is far less costly than upgrading too early (paying for resources you do not use). The domain and DNS layer that connects your hosting to your visitors is a separate but interrelated decision; the Mozilla domain name documentation explains how domains, DNS records, and hosting infrastructure interact in clear, non-marketing language that every website owner should understand before making configuration changes.

Frequently Asked Questions