description: Plain-language explainer of containerized hosting and how it compares to shared hosting and a VPS.
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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.
Think of an **apartment** versus a **townhome in a gated community**.
**Shared hosting** is the apartment. You have your own unit, but the walls are thin. When the neighbour upstairs hosts a party, you hear it. When someone two doors down cooks something pungent, you smell it. You're sharing the same air, the same plumbing risers, the same elevator — so what one tenant does ripples through everyone else's day.
**Containerized hosting** is the townhome in a gated community. You still benefit from shared community resources — the gates, the security, the community centre, the maintained grounds — but you have your own walls, your own kitchen, your own front door. Whatever the neighbouring townhome does inside their walls stays inside their walls. You only feel the upside of being in the community, not the noise.
- **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.
- **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.
- **Isolation = security.** A vulnerability in another customer's site can't reach yours. There's a hard boundary between containers.
- **Add resources without moving.** Need more RAM next month? Upgrade in place — no migration, no downtime.
## How it compares to a VPS
- **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`.
- **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.
- **Cheaper to run small.** Containers share the host efficiently, so you don't pay for an idle VM sitting at 5% CPU all day.
## What it doesn't change
- **SFTP still works** within the limits of your plan, so your usual file-upload workflow is unaffected.
- **Your databases still live next to your site**, on the same host, with low-latency connections.
- **Your domain works the same way** — DNS, SSL, redirects all behave like any other web host.
## When you might want a VPS instead
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.
