When a new website is being discussed, hosting is usually the last thing anyone thinks about, and it’s often chosen on price alone. But where your website is hosted directly affects its speed, stability, security and how much it costs to grow.
Shared hosting
Your website shares a server with hundreds (sometimes thousands) of other customers’ websites. It’s the cheapest option and the most common one for small WordPress sites.
Pros: very low price, simple control panel, little maintenance on your part.
Cons: performance depends on what your “neighbours” do; if another website on the server gets a lot of traffic, yours can slow down. There’s little room for configuration and resources are limited.
Makes sense for: small content websites with little traffic and no complex business logic.
Platforms for static websites and frontends
Services such as Vercel, Netlify or Cloudflare Pages are designed for websites built with modern tools like Astro. They serve pages from a network of servers spread around the world (a CDN), so each visitor gets the website from the nearest point.
Pros: excellent speed, automatic HTTPS, simple deployments and, for many projects, low or zero cost.
Cons: they aren’t designed to host complex backends with their own databases; for that they’re combined with other services.
Makes sense for: corporate websites, landing pages, blogs and the frontend of larger projects.
VPS (virtual private server)
You have a slice of a server reserved just for you, with guaranteed resources and full control over its configuration.
Pros: predictable performance, freedom to install whatever you need (for example, a Django application with its database), good value for money.
Cons: someone has to administer it: security updates, backups, monitoring. Without that maintenance, a VPS can end up less secure than shared hosting.
Makes sense for: web applications with their own backend and moderate traffic, when there’s a technical person responsible for the server.
Managed cloud
Providers such as AWS, Google Cloud or Azure, and platforms that simplify using them, offer services that scale automatically: managed databases, file storage, servers that grow with demand.
Pros: scalability, high availability and managed services that reduce administration work.
Cons: pay-as-you-go billing can be hard to predict, and the initial setup requires experience.
Makes sense for: platforms with variable or high traffic, or businesses whose operations depend critically on the website.
What to ask before choosing
- Where are the servers? For speed and, if you handle personal data, for GDPR compliance.
- Who makes the backups, and how often? Have they ever been test-restored?
- What happens if traffic multiplies in high season?
- Who takes care of security updates?
The most common combination in our projects
For businesses that need to grow, we usually separate the pieces: the Astro frontend hosted on a platform with a CDN, and the Django backend on a server or managed service. Each part lives where it works best, and one can be scaled without touching the other.