Shared Hosting vs Cloud Server vs Bare Metal: How to Choose

Choosing the wrong platform costs either money (over-provisioning) or sleep (outgrowing your plan mid-launch). Here's the honest decision guide we give our own customers.

Shared Hosting — from $5.99/mo

Choose it when: you run WordPress, a business site, a store, or any PHP application, and you'd rather never see a terminal.

• Zero server management: the stack (CloudLinux, LiteSpeed, WordPress Toolkit) is maintained for you;
• Free SSL and daily backups included;
• One-click installers for 400+ applications.

Skip it when: you need custom system services, background workers, Docker, or non-PHP runtimes.

Cloud Servers — from $8.49/mo

Choose it when: you need root access, your own stack, or fast scaling. Deployed in seconds, billed flexibly, snapshots available.

• Essential (shared x86): projects, staging, small APIs;
• Arc (ARM64): best price/performance for containerized workloads;
• Fusion (dedicated EPYC™ cores): production databases and APIs — zero noisy neighbors.

Skip it when: your workload saturates many cores 24/7 — at that point dedicated hardware wins on price.

Bare Metal — from $112.99/mo

Choose it when: you need the entire machine: virtualization hosts, game servers, big databases, storage clusters (Atlas up to 308 TB), or GPU compute (Pulse, up to 96 GB VRAM for LLM inference and fine-tuning).

• 100% of the hardware, no hypervisor overhead;
• IPMI/KVM console — install any OS, recover from anything;
• Unmetered 1 Gbps bandwidth.

Skip it when: you deploy/destroy environments frequently — cloud elasticity fits that rhythm better.

The 30-second decision tree

1. Just need a website online? → Shared Hosting.
2. Need root, Docker or custom software? → Cloud Server.
3. Sustained heavy CPU/RAM/storage or GPU? → Bare Metal.

Still unsure? Every plan is upgradeable with prorated billing — start one tier down and move up when the metrics say so. Or just ask us: describe your workload in a ticket and an engineer (not a sales bot) will size it for you.