Not every WordPress site needs its own hardware. These do.
- Content sites with real traffic. Publishers, communities and membership sites where a chunk of visitors are logged in, which means the page cache can’t save you and every request hits PHP and MySQL.
- Agencies with a portfolio. Twenty or fifty client sites on one server with cPanel accounts, one bill, one place to patch. See cPanel dedicated servers for the panel options.
- Multisite networks. WordPress multisite shares one database and one codebase across every site in the network, so one slow site drags the rest. Dedicated CPU and RAM remove the ceiling.
- Stores. Cart, checkout and the My Account pages bypass the cache on purpose. If you sell on WooCommerce, read the WooCommerce hosting on a dedicated server page, which covers the store-specific parts.
- Anyone getting resource-limit notices. CPU throttling, entry-process caps and 503s during a campaign are your host telling you the plan is too small.
| Shared hosting | VPS | Dedicated server | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU and RAM | Shared with hundreds of accounts, capped per account | A reserved slice of one physical host | The whole physical server |
| Noisy neighbors | Constant | Possible on the same host | None |
| Root access | No | Yes | Yes |
| PHP and web server choice | Whatever the host picked | Yours | Yours |
| Best fit | Small brochure sites | Mid-size sites, staging, dev | Busy sites, agencies, multisite, stores |
Still deciding between a VPS and a dedicated server? We sell both, and we wrote up when WordPress on a VPS is enough and when it isn’t.