Hi, friendly hosting provider here with 8 years of honest hosting experience in providing web-hosting through my own side-business and day job for setting up full scale multiple dedicated server solutions for websites receiving 10,000s of visitors a minute. I'm pretty clued up in all ends of the hosting market (Shared, VPS, Dedicated and Private Cloud solutions), especially so in shared hosting and cPanel in general so happy to help with any questions and get you on the right path.
First and foremost, if the websites are for companies or in any way responsible for earning money then
please please do not go down the un-managed VPS route even if it does have a pre-installed panel. Too much can go wrong and often something will go wrong.
Shared Hosting is perfectly fine if you ensure you get it from a decent company.
I've saved many companies paying £100s-1000s/month to AWS/GCP/DO/Vultr/Contabo with eye-wateringly irrelevant specs or poorly configured VPS's to simple shared hosting for £5-25 a month.
The only real benefit that such "cloud" provider VPS companies offer traditional hosting customers is the ability to scale and the high availability platform that it's based on
Pros of
good shared hosting vs
self-managed VPS
- You don't have to know how to manage, secure or maintain a webserver.
- You have a support team available to help or guide you as best as they can.
- You don't need to be available 24/7 in the event of a server issue and likewise you don't need the knowledge required to efficiently troubleshoot such issues.
- You get a wealth of server-level features such as anti-virus, malware scanner, inclusive backups, LiteSpeed Enterprise (or a very well optimized apache/nginx setup depending on the host) and various other plugins/features that a shared hosting provider offers.
- You get a useable email service. Try sending email from a VPS IP and let me know how far you get
(Blacklisted for spam)
- Proper hosting account isolation - if your VPS is hacked then you can safely assume all sites are compromised. If one account is hacked on a shared host then only that one account will be affected.
Cons of shared hosting.
- Too easy to find a bad host or one that that upsells, oversells and outsources.
- Could often be on a single dedicated server with no underlying failover. Though as someone who also provides dedicated servers, dedicated server failures are incredibly rare and you'd probably see higher uptime than the full-scale cloud providers given they have more points of failure at both a hypervisor and network layer.
- More restrictive; with a VPS you usually have root access and can do whatever you like - though it doesn't sound like that is a useful feature for you here.
Don't be lulled into a false sense of resources with a VPS either. Unless explicitly stated, VPS resources are shared just as much as shared hosting might be and are in fact more susceptible to the noisy neighbour effect.
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Who is your host at the moment? In any case, it does sound like Shared Hosting is what you need, you just need to be somewhere a bit better! With that said - are you able to see your CPU/RAM/IO/PROC usage in your control panel with your existing host? If these aren't maxing out and you have multiple sites taking seconds to load then the first step is often to move host.
