Web hosting categories
Created
Reviewedbyfl
🗂️
The hosting market has no clean labels, and they shift constantly - new tech, plus vendors blurring them on purpose. This is our map.
| Category | In short |
|---|---|
| Shared hosting | Cheap, oversold, thin walls |
| VPS | Your own VM, your sysadmin job |
| Server management | A panel that runs a VPS for you |
| Vanity hosting | Hosting for software ecosystems |
| Serverless | Runs on demand, billed per use |
| PaaS | Push code, the platform runs it |
| IaaS | Cloud parts you wire together yourself |
| Low-code / no-code | Prompt a site |
| Managed hosting | Experts build and run custom infra for you |
Shared hosting
The cheap end. Dozens of sites crammed onto one machine, walls only at the directory level, and oversold on top. Fine for a brochure site nobody leans on. Fragile the moment it ships from Git, runs a background job, or has to stay up under load.
VPS
A virtual machine with root. Cheap on paper. The real price is your time: the updates, the security patches, the 3 a.m. page are all yours now. Worth it with a sysadmin already on the team, or a stack that truly needs kernel-level control. Otherwise, no.
Server management
Laravel Forge, Ploi, RunCloud, and the rest. A dashboard that provisions and configures a VPS for you. It smooths the setup. It does not take the server off your hands. The OS upgrades and the responsibility still land on you.
Vanity hosting
A polished panel bolted onto someone else's infrastructure, usually at a premium. The experience can be good. The value rarely is.
Serverless
Functions and scale-to-zero containers that run on demand and bill per use. Nothing to manage, scaling handled for you, nothing charged while idle. Good for spiky or mostly-idle work. More to adapt for a steady app.
PaaS
Heroku, Render, Railway, Fly.io, Laravel Cloud, fortrabbit. Push code, the platform runs it. No root to hand over, no infrastructure to assemble. A middle ground for many PHP teams, and where we sit.
IaaS
AWS, GCP, Azure. Raw cloud parts, compute, storage, network, that you wire into a running system yourself. Not hosting in the everyday sense. The parts, not the product.
Low-code / no-code
Lovable, Bolt, v0, and friends. They generate a frontend and host it. Good for a prototype. Not where a PHP app you plan to keep should live.
Managed hosting
The premium, hands-on end. Talk to cloud experts, describe the requirements, and the provider designs, builds, and runs the infrastructure for you, in a data center or on public cloud. Bespoke setups, training and consulting on the menu, uptime guarantees past the usual 99.99%. Think SysEleven or AnyNines in Germany, Rackspace in the US. Expensive, and for a high-stakes e-commerce site or a one-off enterprise stack, worth it. fortrabbit counts as managed hosting too, the automated, standardized version of it, with developer support included instead of a sales call.