Do you need a VPS, or is shared hosting fine?

"Get a VPS" is common advice and often wrong. A server you do not maintain is worse than shared hosting you do not maintain, because nobody else is patching it.

Shared hosting is fine when

• You run one or two ordinary sites.
• Traffic is modest and predictable.
• You need nothing beyond PHP, MySQL and email.
• Nobody on your team wants to think about servers. This is a legitimate requirement.

Good shared hosting at €5–15 a month runs a business site perfectly well. The scorn it attracts online usually comes from people running things it was never for.

You need a VPS when

• You are running something that is not PHP — Node, Python, a queue, a background worker.
• You need software the host will not install: a specific PHP extension, Redis, a headless browser.
• You run several sites and per-site hosting has become the expensive option.
• Resource limits are being hit — a shop at busy periods, or long-running processes being killed.
• You need control over where data lives and who can reach it.

What a VPS actually costs

€5–20 a month for the machine, and then the part nobody quotes: your time. Updates, firewall, SSL renewal, backups, monitoring, and the evening something breaks. Budget two to four hours a month, or a managed arrangement with someone who does it.

The middle option most people miss

Managed WordPress hosting at €20–40 a month gives you most of the performance benefit with none of the administration. For a business site this is usually the right answer, and it is skipped because it sounds less capable than a server.

If you do run one, the non-negotiables

Automatic security updates. A firewall allowing only what is needed. SSH keys, never passwords. Fail2ban. Off-site backups, tested. Uptime monitoring that alerts a human. Docker or similar so a rebuild is an afternoon rather than a memory exercise. And a written note of how it is put together, because in eighteen months you will not remember.