Shared hosting is cheap until it costs you traffic. Here's the decision framework: upgrade to a VPS when your site's growth is being throttled by the host, not when you're just "getting bigger."
On shared hosting you share CPU, RAM, and IO with hundreds of neighbors — one noisy neighbor can slow you down even if your traffic is low. A VPS gives you a dedicated slice (or whole core). The trade is management: you own updates, security, backups.
| Traffic (monthly) | Shared ($/mo) | VPS ($/mo) | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 10k visitors | $3–6 | $6 | Shared is usually fine |
| 10k–50k | $6–12 | $6–12 | Coin flip; test before you move |
| 50k–200k | $12–30 (and unstable) | $10–20 | VPS wins on consistency |
| 200k+ | Hitting limits | $20–50 | VPS/cloud is the right call |
Don't upgrade because a calculator says so. Upgrade when you see: pages that took 2s starting to take 6s at peak, or a host that throttles your site after hitting a "soft limit." That's throttling reading as shared-host oversell — and it's the moment a cheap VPS stops being a luxury and starts being the revenue-preserving move.
A static portfolio, a low-traffic blog, or anything under ~10k visitors can stay on shared and save the management hassle. There's no shame in the cheap plan if it isn't the bottleneck.