The Types of Web Hosting

Learn about the different types of web hosting and when you should choose to invest in more expensive options

By Ryan Thrash  |  Updated: May 20, 2022  |  4 min read
The Types of Web Hosting

If you are a growing business, then your website is probably one of your best assets to reach customers and prospects. It’s your always on (at least it should be!) public billboard to the world. The information below covers options available in the industry and general and what’s available in MODX Cloud.

Smart Hosting for Growing Businesses

Premium Hosting typically comes with specific expertise and support for popular platforms starting at ~$50/month for multi-tenant platforms with managed core infrastructure. WPEngine for WordPress, Pantheon for Drupal, and MODX Cloud for MODX (and the others, too!).

Some hosts, like MODX Cloud, offer upgrades to sites for additional support or to offload maintenance and responsiblity for security or upgrades.

Our fully managed security update service, Security+, adds uptime monitoring, a WAF, proactive incident investigation and resolution, and shifts the responsiblity for CMS and Extras upgrades to MODX. It also comes with no-hack warranty, meaning if something happens, we take care of getting it repaired and preventing it from happening again without additional cost. (Available as a per-site upgrade for $200/month each.)

Self-Managed VPS Hosting

If you have in-house system administration talent that has time for weekly (sometimes daily) system maintenance and experience configuring high-performance hosting, unmanaged VPSes are a great option for powering websites. Vendors like AWS, Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr and others all provide great options for VPS hosting starting as low as $5-10/month. (Not available in MODX Cloud.)

Managed Hosting for Custom Configurations & Strict Governance

Managed VPS hosting provides dedicated, fully managed, single-tenant infrastructure on an isolated IP space. In MODX Cloud, we call this Private Servers and they work exactly like our multi-tenant platforms (see Premium Hosting, above) but are only available to a single customer’s account. Other vendors have similar offerings such as Elite Hosting at Pantheon, Pagely, and other managed hosting providers.

Private servers can accommodate custom configurations such as locking access to the Manager to specific IPs, NoSQL databases, Enterprise search tools, application-specific tuning, or high-traffic caching software. These start as $595/month upgrades with a MODX Cloud Pro plan subscription.

Hosting for Maximum Uptime

Failover Hosting uses a load balancer and site health monitoring to minimize downtime by dynamically failing over to a backup server if a hardware failure, application error, network disruption, or data center outage occurs. Failover hosting is included in our Uptime+ upgrade for $100/month per site and works with both multi-tenant and private servers on MODX Cloud Pro subscriptions and above.

Similarly, High Availability (HA) hosting uses three or more servers across regions that kept in sync in near real-time. Any down or slow nodes are automatically removed from the content-serving pool. When the root cause is resolved, they re-sync and resume serving production traffic. HA is designed for maximum uptime even during unscheduled maintenance or multi-region outages. Distributed HA Clusters start as $2495/month upgrades with a MODX Cloud Business plan subscription ($275/month).

Low Cost Shared Hosting

Low cost shared hosting quality is all over the board, but it is too often delivered through over-sold commodity hardware (thanks to industry roll-ups like EIG). These typically are cPanel servers and costs less than a trip or two to Starbucks each month—and you’ll often find support about as helpful as the Barista that blended your double-pump venti something or other. It’s not the ideal option if you might ever need support for your critical online presence or you want the fastest page load times, but you can find shared hosts under $5/month. (Not available in MODX Cloud.)


If you want to learn more about key considerations when choosing hosting, please read What Type of Hosting Do I Really Need?, or if you have any questions please contact us for hosting advice.

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