Comparison
Shared, VPS or cloud: three tiers, three kinds of company
The distance between 100 lei a year and €300 a month is not marketing — these are three fundamentally different products.
From 100 lei a year to over €300 a month: that is how wide the hosting spectrum runs, and every tier has a legitimate audience. Shared hosting, at 100–400 lei a year, means hundreds of sites packed onto the same physical machine — entirely sufficient for a low-traffic brochure site and exactly right for most small companies. A VPS, at €20–80 a month, carves out a guaranteed slice of resources and gives you root access — a fit for online stores and small applications — but administering the server falls entirely on you: system updates, security, backups. Managed cloud, at €50–300+ a month, adds scaling for traffic peaks, automated backups and monitoring, at a price that only justifies itself once the site genuinely makes money. Choose by symptoms rather than ambitions: if the site falls over when you run campaigns, leave shared hosting; if you have nobody technical in the company, go managed rather than take an empty VPS nobody will look after. Below you will also find the signs that you are paying VPS money for repainted shared hosting.
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Key takeaways
Where shared hosting wins
An unbeatable price at 100–400 lei a year, with a simple control panel, email and an SSL certificate included. For brochure sites with hundreds or a few thousand visits a month, anything pricier is money thrown at unused capacity.
Where the VPS wins
Resources that are yours alone — the noisy neighbours of shared hosting no longer slow your site down — plus root access for any special configuration. The optimal price-performance point for an online store with steady traffic.
Where managed cloud wins
Somebody else answers for the server so you do not have to: automatic scaling at peaks, verified backups, monitoring with alerts. For applications and stores where one hour of downtime costs more than the monthly invoice.
The symptoms that tell you which tier you need
Stay on shared hosting for as long as the site is a business card: it loads acceptably, receives hundreds or a few thousand visits a month and processes no orders. The moment to leave announces itself through symptoms: pages crawling at peak hours, resource-limit errors in the control panel, or the site going down exactly when the paid campaign is running — that is, when every visitor has already cost you money.
Moving to a VPS carries one condition providers keep quiet about: an unmanaged server is your responsibility — an unpatched system, a missing firewall, non-existent backups, all yours. Without an in-house technical person or an administration contract at €30–100 a month, a bare VPS is riskier than the shared hosting you left. The practical rule: if you have a technical person, take the VPS; if you do not, take managed — the price difference is exactly the cost of sleeping soundly.
The traps inside hosting offers
The most common one is shared hosting resold at VPS prices. The signs: “guaranteed resources” with no concrete processor and memory figures, no root access, and process-count limits buried in the terms and conditions. A real VPS comes with exact specifications: the number of virtual cores, the gigabytes of RAM and of SSD storage, written into the offer in black and white. If you cannot see them, ask; if the answer is vague, walk.
The second trap is the first-year promotional price. Hosting at 50 lei a year becomes 300+ lei on renewal, and migrating a site is not free — you either pay somebody or risk a move that loses your email. Always compare the renewal price rather than the entry price, and request a downloadable backup archive every quarter: it is your insurance policy against both the provider and your own mistakes.
Frequently asked questions
How do I check whether the VPS in an offer is a real one?
Ask for three figures in writing: dedicated virtual cores, guaranteed RAM and the storage type (SSD or NVMe), then verify root access and the right to reinstall the operating system. A VPS without root access, or with resources quoted as “up to” instead of guaranteed, is shared hosting in a nice suit.
The site only struggles during campaigns — should I change hosting?
Measure first: if it loads fast at normal traffic and only chokes at peaks, the problem is capacity and a VPS or a cloud plan with scaling fixes it. If it is slow with no traffic at all, the cause is inside the site (images, plugins, code), and moving to an expensive server merely masks the problem expensively.
Is hosting inside Romania worth it, or should I use foreign servers?
For a Romanian audience, a server in Romania or Central Europe delivers response times of 10–40 ms against 100+ ms from across the ocean — a difference you feel on every click. Local-language support at three in the morning matters too; test it with a ticket before you sign.
How often should backups run and where should they live?
Daily for stores and applications, weekly for brochure sites — but the golden rule is different: at least one copy must exist outside the hosting provider, downloaded locally or held in another cloud. A backup stored on the same server as the site disappears together with it.
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Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247