How Hosting Choices Impact Website Speed

You can optimize your images, minify your CSS, lazy-load everything — and still have a slow website. Why? Because your hosting is the bottleneck.

The Hosting Performance Spectrum

Not all hosting is created equal. Here's the rough hierarchy:

• **Shared hosting** ($5-15/mo): Your site shares a server with hundreds of others. Performance is unpredictable.
• **Managed WordPress hosting** ($25-50/mo): Optimized for WordPress with caching, CDN, and server-level tweaks.
• **VPS/Cloud hosting** ($20-100/mo): Your own virtual server. Performance scales with your plan.
• **Premium managed** ($50-200/mo): Companies like BigScoots that hand-optimize your server configuration.

What Actually Makes a Difference

Server Response Time (TTFB) This is how long the server takes to start sending data. A good TTFB is under 200ms. Many shared hosts are 600ms+. That's almost half a second before your site even starts loading.

Geographic Location If your server is in Texas and your visitors are in London, that's ~100ms of latency just from physics. A CDN helps, but your origin server location still matters for dynamic content.

PHP Workers and Memory On WordPress, every page request needs PHP processing. If your host limits PHP workers (most shared hosts do), requests queue up during traffic spikes. Your site feels fast with 10 visitors and crawls with 100.

My Recommendation

If your website is important to your business — which it should be — don't cheap out on hosting. The difference between a $10/mo shared host and a $50/mo managed host is night and day. And the ROI is immediate: faster sites rank better, convert better, and bounce less.