Determine the right hosting specification for your website based on expected traffic, storage needs, uptime requirements, and performance targets.
| Specification | Shared | VPS | Dedicated | Cloud / Serverless |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly Cost | £5–20 | £20–80 | £80–250 | £10–200 |
| Monthly Visitors | Up to 10K | 10K–100K | 100K+ | Auto-scales |
| CPU | Shared | 1–4 vCPU | 4–16 CPU | On-demand |
| RAM | 512 MB–1 GB | 2–8 GB | 8–64 GB | Auto-managed |
| Storage | 5–20 GB | 20–100 GB SSD | 100 GB–1 TB | Pay-per-use |
| Uptime SLA | 99% | 99.5–99.9% | 99.9–99.99% | 99.95%+ |
| SSL | Often extra | Free (Let’s Encrypt) | Included | Included |
| Backups | Manual / extra | Configurable | Included daily | Automatic |
| Best For | Blogs, small sites | Growing businesses | High-traffic, regulated | Modern web apps |
Prices are typical UK hosting rates excluding VAT. Cloud/serverless costs scale with usage. Cloudswitched includes hosting with every web development project
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Most brochure and small e-commerce sites run well on shared or cloud hosting from £5-£25 per month, handling a few thousand monthly visitors comfortably. Higher-traffic sites, or those needing guaranteed uptime and faster response times, typically move to VPS or managed cloud hosting from £30-£100+ monthly.
Shared hosting typically supports a few thousand to around 10,000 monthly visitors before performance degrades, since server resources are split across many customers. Traffic spikes (launches, ad campaigns) are the most common trigger for needing to upgrade to VPS or dedicated resources.
Cloud hosting is sufficient for the vast majority of UK SMEs, offering scalability without the cost and maintenance burden of a dedicated server. Dedicated servers typically only make sense for very high-traffic sites or specific compliance requirements around data isolation.
A typical brochure site uses under 1GB of storage and modest bandwidth, while sites with lots of images, video, or e-commerce catalogues can need 5-20GB and considerably more bandwidth. This calculator estimates your requirements based on expected traffic and content type.
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