Where to put a small site

I spend my working hours on ECS, queues, and a Postgres instance with a migration plan. So the advice people expect from me, when they ask where to put a site, is a VPS and a deploy pipeline.

That is usually the wrong answer.

The question is not power, it is ownership

Every hosting choice is really a choice about who owns the operating system.

A VPS gives you the whole machine, which means you own the whole machine: the kernel updates, the TLS renewal, the firewall, the backup that you will discover was never running on the day you need it. That is a fine trade when the site earns enough to pay for the attention, or when you enjoy it. This site runs that way — nginx and systemd on a box I patch myself — because I am the kind of person who reads journalctl for fun.

Shared and managed hosting sells you the opposite trade. You give up root, and in exchange somebody else's team is on call for the layer beneath your site. For a brochure site, a WordPress install, a portfolio, or a small business page that has to exist and stay up, that trade is almost always correct.

Three questions that decide it

Before picking anything, answer these honestly.

• Will you ever SSH into it? If the answer is no, you do not want a VPS. A server nobody logs into is a server nobody patches.
• Does it need to run your own code? WordPress, a static site, a small PHP app — shared hosting runs these fine. A NestJS API with a worker process and a Redis dependency does not belong there.
• What happens if it is down for six hours? If the honest answer is "I lose a customer," you are buying a support contract, not a machine. Check who answers the phone before you check the specs.

Where shared hosting is the wrong call

I would not put any of these on it:

• Anything with a background worker, a queue, or a long-running process.
• Anything where you need to pin a runtime version, because you will not get to.
• Anything with real traffic spikes. Shared plans are sold on the assumption that the neighbours are quiet, and a front page that is not quiet will get throttled.
• Anything holding data you would have to notify people about losing. Not because shared hosts are careless, but because you want backups you control.

For everything else — which is most small sites — the boring option wins on the only axis that matters after launch week: how much of your attention it costs per month.

The migration is not the disaster you think

The objection I hear is that starting small means a painful move later. In practice, a WordPress site moves between hosts in an afternoon, and a static site moves in minutes. The painful migrations are the ones I get paid for, and they are painful for a different reason: twenty years of data in a schema nobody documented, not a web server.

Pick the smallest thing that works. Move when it stops working, and not before.