Choose hosting by matching three things: what your framework needs at runtime, your monthly traffic, and how much maintenance time you have. Static sites belong on a CDN, server-rendered applications under 100,000 requests belong on a virtual private server, and managed platforms are worth their premium only when engineering time costs more than the bill.

Key takeaways

  • Runtime first. If your framework needs a Node process, shared hosting is already ruled out — no amount of price comparison changes that.
  • Headline prices mislead. Managed platforms advertise a base tier; the bill is decided by bandwidth and invocation overages above it.
  • A $6 VPS goes further than people expect. Cached workloads serve 50,000–150,000 monthly visits on one core.
  • Hosting affects SEO indirectly. It sets time to first byte, which feeds Largest Contentful Paint and crawl budget.
  • The break-even is time, not money. Managed hosting pays for itself if it saves two hours a month at typical developer rates.

The decision path in five questions

Work down this list in order. The first answer that rules a tier out is usually the whole decision — the remaining comparison is detail.

  1. Does it need a running process? Node, Python or Java runtimes rule out shared hosting immediately.
  2. Is the output static after build? If yes, a CDN-backed static host costs almost nothing and outperforms everything else.
  3. What is the monthly request volume? Under 100,000 requests, a small VPS is the cheapest reliable option.
  4. How much bandwidth leaves the origin? Above roughly 1 TB, managed platform overages start dominating the bill.
  5. How many maintenance hours can you spare? If the honest answer is zero, pay the managed premium and stop optimising.

What each hosting tier actually gives you

Shared hosting rents you a slice of a busy machine. A virtual private server rents you guaranteed CPU and memory that you administer. Managed platforms run the infrastructure and charge for usage. Static hosting serves pre-built files from a CDN with no origin server at all.

Hosting tiers compared on modelled cost and operational burden. List pricing July 2026; latency column publishes once measured.
Tier Cost / month Median TTFB Traffic ceiling Best for
Shared $3 – $10 pending ~20k visits Brochure sites, low-traffic WordPress
VPS $6 – $28 pending 50k – 150k visits Server-rendered apps, full control
Managed platform $20 – $101 pending Elastic Teams without ops capacity
Static + CDN $0 – $5 pending Effectively unlimited Blogs, docs, marketing sites

Costs are modelled from published list pricing. TTFB will be measured from Frankfurt, Mumbai and Virginia — median of 50 requests against a warm cache — and published only once run.

Egress
Data leaving the provider’s network toward your visitors. It is billed separately from storage and compute on most cloud platforms, and it is the line item that turns a predictable $20 hosting bill into an unpredictable $90 one.
Costs are modelled; latency is not yet measured. Cost figures derive from published list pricing using the formula shown in the calculator, so you can re-run them today. Latency columns read pending until the benchmark rig has actually been run — no performance number appears here before it is measured.

Hosting by framework

Framework choice constrains hosting more sharply than traffic does. These are the pairings that hold up in production.

Recommended hosting tier by framework, with the constraint that drives the recommendation.
Framework Recommended tier Deciding constraint
Next.js (SSR) VPS, or managed under 1 TB egress Invocation and bandwidth overages
Next.js (static export) Static + CDN No runtime needed after build
Django / Flask VPS Long-lived process, database proximity
Java / Spring Boot VPS, 4 GB RAM minimum JVM heap and startup cost
WordPress Shared under 20k visits, else managed WP PHP workers and cache strategy
Astro / Hugo / Eleventy Static + CDN Build output is plain files
Disclosure: some hosting links below are affiliate links, which means this site may earn a commission if you sign up. Rankings come from measured results only — providers cannot pay for placement, and results that reflect badly on affiliate partners are published unchanged.

Matching hosting to traffic level

Below 20,000 monthly visits, hosting cost barely matters and shared hosting suffices for static-ish sites. Between 20,000 and 150,000 visits, a virtual private server is cheapest and fastest. Above that, the decision shifts from price to whether you want to operate infrastructure at all.

  • Under 20,000 visits. Any tier works. Optimise for the least effort, not the lowest price.
  • 20,000–150,000 visits. A 2 vCPU / 4 GB VPS with a CDN in front handles this comfortably at $12–$18 per month.
  • 150,000–1M visits. Either a larger VPS with proper caching, or a managed platform if ops time is scarce.
  • Above 1M visits. Bandwidth economics dominate; CDN offload and egress pricing decide the bill, not the compute tier.

Moving between hosts without losing rankings

A hosting migration does not harm SEO when URLs stay identical, redirects are in place before DNS changes, and the new origin is at least as fast. Ranking losses after migrations are almost always caused by missing redirects, error responses during propagation, or an unnoticed slowdown — not by the move itself.

  1. Lower the DNS TTL to 300 seconds at least 48 hours before the move.
  2. Deploy and verify the site on the new host using its raw address or a staging hostname.
  3. Confirm TLS certificates issue correctly before any traffic is pointed at it.
  4. Compare response codes across a full URL list on both origins — no new 404s or 500s.
  5. Switch DNS, keep the old host live for 72 hours, and monitor server logs for stragglers.
The mistake that actually costs rankings. Decommissioning the old server the same day DNS changes. Resolvers ignore TTLs more often than they should, and some crawlers will hit the old origin for days. Leaving it running is free insurance.

Guides in this section

More guides publish twice weekly. Java and WordPress cost breakdowns are next.

Badri Dutta

Software engineer · 15 years building for the web

Started with hand-written HTML and jQuery, spent eight years on technical SEO taking small business sites to page one, then moved into Java, Python and AWS in production. Writes here about the hosting and performance decisions that sit between those two worlds.

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