Shared vs Cloud Hosting

Shared vs cloud hosting: the difference in one paragraph

Shared hosting runs many websites on one physical server, with each account capped on CPU, RAM and entry processes. Cloud hosting runs your site as a virtual machine on a cluster of hosts, with its own allocated vCPU and RAM, and restarts it elsewhere when a host fails. Buy shared for a blog, brochure site or young shop; buy cloud when downtime or a traffic spike costs more than the plan.

Both run the same PHP, MySQL and WordPress stack. What changes is who carries the risk. On shared, the provider caps every tenant so one site cannot take the machine down. On cloud, you rent a slice large enough for your peak and pay for the restart elsewhere. A virtual machine on a single host is not a cloud; the failover is what separates the two.

• Shared: one server, many accounts, caps on entry processes, CPU and inodes.
• Cloud: allocated vCPU and RAM, live migration or restart on another host.
• Same software stack, different failure model and price.

Side-by-side comparison

The table compares the parts that change a buying decision, not the marketing labels. Prices are WebJi's published rates, read on 30 October 2026, before 18% GST.

What shared hosting is good at, and where it breaks

Shared hosting is the cheapest way to run a normal website. WebJi's L-Basic is ₹300 a month before GST and includes cPanel, free SSL and email on your domain. For a blog, a brochure site or a shop taking a few hundred orders a month, nothing in the cloud column improves the visitor's experience.

It breaks at a measured limit, not at a feeling. In cPanel open Metrics, then Resource Usage. Entry processes, CPU percentage, physical memory and inode count are all there, with the 24-hour peak next to the cap. When a normal day hits the cap, pages return 503 and checkout stalls.

• Entry processes maxed at peak: PHP requests queue, so pages time out while the database is idle.
• CPU percentage pinned for hours: usually a plugin, a cron job or an unindexed database query.
• Inodes near the limit: mail folders and backups, not the website files.
• A noisy neighbour is capped too, so the cause is usually your own traffic or code, not the server next door.

Caching fixes the first two when the page is mostly static: LiteSpeed cache plus a CDN serves HTML without spending PHP workers. It does not fix a checkout, a members area or an API that must run code on every request. That is the point where shared stops being the right product.

What cloud hosting buys you

Cloud hosting buys three things: allocated resources, a restart elsewhere when hardware fails, and room to resize without moving hosts. WebJi Cloud Entry gives 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM and 100 GB storage; Cloud Business and Cloud Pro scale that up.

It does not buy speed by itself. A cached WordPress page on a tuned LiteSpeed shared plan can answer faster than an untuned cloud VM, because the bottleneck is usually PHP workers, a heavy theme or an unindexed database. Cloud helps when your own vCPU is the limit, or when an hour offline costs more than the monthly difference. Compare the specs on the cloud hosting page before you assume the bigger number is faster.

Price in India: what the gap buys

At WebJi, shared starts at ₹300 a month and Cloud Entry at ₹5,900 a month, both before 18% GST. The entry gap is about twenty times, so the cloud decision needs a number behind it.

Now price one hour of downtime: orders lost, support time, ad spend that lands on an error page. If that hour costs more than the monthly gap, Cloud Entry is the cheaper line item. If a slow hour is annoying but not expensive, shared hosting plus a CDN is the better rupee-for-rupee spend. The full card sits on pricing.

How to choose in three checks

Three checks settle it: what the resource graph says, what an hour offline costs, and whether the site needs root. Do them in that order.

1. Open cPanel, Metrics, Resource Usage and read the 24-hour peak for entry processes and CPU. If the peak sits under the cap on your busiest day, stay on shared.
2. Price one hour of downtime in lost orders and support time. Compare it with the monthly gap between your shared plan and Cloud Entry.
3. Decide whether you need root: a custom daemon, a firewall rule or a PHP extension the panel does not offer means cloud or a VPS, not shared.

Two yes answers point to cloud. One or none points to shared. Write the reason down before you buy, so the next renewal is a decision rather than an argument.

Moving from shared to cloud without downtime

The move is a copy, a test and a DNS switch. WebJi migration is free subject to terms and approval, and the old plan stays live until you are satisfied.

1. Provision the cloud server next to the shared account and install the same PHP version and extensions.
2. Copy files and databases with a cPanel backup restore, or let the migration team do it.
3. Test the new server through a hosts-file entry before public DNS changes, including forms and checkout.
4. Lower the TTL on the A record to 300 seconds a day ahead, so the switch is quick.
5. Switch the A record, watch the error log for 24 hours, and keep the shared plan for a week as a fallback.

Triggers that justify the move: repeated 503s at normal traffic, checkout needing more PHP workers than the shared cap allows, a contract that names an uptime figure, or software that needs root. Vanity visitor counts are not a trigger. The step-by-step version is in the cloud migration guide.