41 lines
2.7 KiB
Plaintext
41 lines
2.7 KiB
Plaintext
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---
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title: What is containerized hosting?
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description: Plain-language explainer of containerized hosting and how it compares to shared hosting and a VPS.
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sidebar:
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order: 2
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---
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Containerized hosting means your site lives in its own lightweight, isolated environment — a "container" — on one of our servers. Your container is yours alone. Its CPU, memory, disk, and software versions don't depend on what other customers on the same machine are doing.
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## An analogy
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Think of a shared house with one kitchen versus an apartment building. **Shared hosting** is the house: lots of people share the same kitchen, and when one person leaves dishes in the sink, everyone notices. **Containerized hosting** gives you your own apartment, with your own kitchen, in the same building — you still benefit from the shared infrastructure (heat, security, plumbing), but day-to-day you're not stepping on anyone else's mess.
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## How it compares to shared hosting
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- **Predictable performance.** Another customer can't slow your site down by running a big import or sending a traffic spike. Your CPU and memory are yours.
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- **Pick your software versions.** PHP 8.3 or 8.4? Node 20 or 22? You choose at the site level. Different sites on the same account can use different versions.
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- **Isolation = security.** A vulnerability in another customer's site can't reach yours. There's a hard boundary between containers.
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- **Add resources without moving.** Need more RAM next month? Upgrade in place — no migration, no downtime.
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## How it compares to a VPS
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- **No server admin required.** We patch the underlying OS, monitor the host, and back up the underlying disk. You focus on your site, not on `apt update`.
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- **Right-sized resources.** A VPS gives you a whole virtual machine whether you need it or not. A container gives your site exactly the CPU, RAM, and disk you actually use — and you can resize whenever.
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- **Cheaper to run small.** Containers share the host efficiently, so you don't pay for an idle VM sitting at 5% CPU all day.
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## What it doesn't change
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- **SFTP still works** within the limits of your plan, so your usual file-upload workflow is unaffected.
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- **Your databases still live next to your site**, on the same host, with low-latency connections.
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- **Your domain works the same way** — DNS, SSL, redirects all behave like any other web host.
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## When you might want a VPS instead
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We'll be honest with you: if you need kernel-level tweaks, custom networking, non-standard runtimes we don't support, or root over SSH, a VPS may suit you better. Most sites don't need any of that — and the trade-off is that you're then responsible for your own OS upkeep.
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## Related
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- [Add-ons overview](/whp/add-ons/overview/)
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- [Service hostnames](/whp/reference/service-hostnames/)
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